At St Mary Steps, at the bottom of Stepcote Hill near the West Gate, the attendance at a Thursday midnight service was likely to be sparse. Although many of those who lived within the few hundred paces served by the church would come on a Sunday, Adam of Dol knew that only a handful of the most devout would appear in the middle of a week-night. No one would come to Prime at dawn, so Adam had given up any pretence at public devotions then, reserving his efforts for High Mass in mid-morning and Vespers in the afternoon.
He was a stocky man of medium height, thick-necked and red-faced, his high colour tending to deepen rapidly when his short temper was aroused. This evening, as the May light was fading, he moved about his church with short, jerky steps, as if he was always in a hurry, though the tempo of life at St Mary’s was hardly demanding.
The building was slightly larger than All-Hallows-on-the-Wall, its near neighbour just along the road. The rectangular nave was quite high and the end facing the road had a new stumpy tower with two bells. Originally wood, it had been rebuilt in stone about fifty years previously, with a bequest from the wealthy owner of a fulling mill on Exe Island, just the other side of the city wall; the man had wished to ensure the welfare of his immortal soul with such generosity.
Dedicated to St Mary, as were three other Exeter churches, it took its nickname from the cross-steps that traversed Stepcote Hill alongside the church, which was so steep as to need shallow terracing to prevent man and beast from falling flat on their faces. Though better endowed than All-Hallows, it was not a wealthy establishment and Father Adam remained disappointed that this was all that had been allotted to a priest of his talents.
At forty-two, his ambition to become a canon had stagnated, but he had insufficient insight to realise that his own abrasive nature was the main stumbling-block to his advancement. As he strutted around his domain, adjusting the embroidered altar-cloth and pointlessly moving the brass candlesticks half an inch, he irritated himself — as he did several times a day — by rehearsing his life history and bemoaning the cruelties of fate that had held him back.
Born in Brittany, under the shadow of St Samson’s great church, he was the second son of a second son of a noble of Dol. When Adam was a child his father had crossed the water to Devon and with family help, had become a substantial land-owner near Totnes. With an elder brother, Adam had had little inheritance to look forward to, so he had been packed off at an early age to the abbey school in Bath and followed the expected route into Holy Orders. At sixteen, he moved to Wells and although it had long lost its bishop in favour of Bath, there were still canons there and eventually he became a secondary, then a vicar. He had hoped to stay in Wells and eventually obtain a prebend, which would elevate him to the rank of canon, but his short temper and argumentative nature caused him to fall out with both members of the Chapter and many of his fellows. At twenty-seven, he cast the dust of Wells from his feet and moved to Exeter as a vicar-choral, with the same ambition to obtain a prebend.
Once again, the pattern was repeated, and although he stayed in the cathedral precinct for half a decade, his imperious manner won him few friends and he was repeatedly disappointed in his hopes to become a canon-elect. Finally, the Archdeacon of Exeter, a predecessor of John de Alençon, took him aside and whispered a few home truths, but offered him the solace of a living at St Mary Steps where he would at least be his own man.
He had accepted reluctantly, and there he had stayed, a disgruntled priest convinced he was cut out for higher office, an attitude he shared with Matilda’s hero, the priest of St Olave’s. Adam still had a modest income from a share in his father’s estate at Totnes and, with some money saved from that, he had purchased a richly embroidered alb and chasuble, which he kept locked in a chest in his lodgings behind the church, ready for the time when he would become an archdeacon or even a bishop.
Since his days in Wells, he had acquired a reputation as an impassioned preacher, and his fiery sermons were one reason for the respectable attendance at his church on Sundays: many of his flock enjoyed being thrilled and temporarily frightened by his graphic description of the horrors of hell that awaited them unless they trod in the paths of righteousness. He was under no illusions about the ephemeral nature of his threats and knew that most of his parishioners had forgotten them by the time they reached home for dinner or the tavern for their ale. But his outbursts were a welcome safety valve for his own frustrations and he enjoyed the reactions of his audience to the lurid pictures he drew of tortures in Hades — the groans, the blanched faces and even a dead faint from the more susceptible matrons.
Now as he replaced the stumps of candle on the altar with new ones, he was already working on the horrors for his sermon on the coming Sabbath. This week he rather fancied tearing out tongues with barbed hooks and seizing nipples in red-hot pincers. These ideas gave him a sexual frisson, and he knew that before long he would have to make another journey to Bristol or Salisbury, ostensibly a pilgrimage but really to visit a brothel. Some of his priestly colleagues in Exeter were quite open about their mistresses or their whoring, but something had always inhibited Adam from fouling his own nest.
As the years went by, his mind divided increasingly between his crusade to warn his flock of the perils of hell-fire that awaited them if they sinned — and the sins he himself enjoyed, both with harlots and the vicarious thrills of increasingly perverted imaginings of the reward Satan had in store for those who failed to heed their priest’s warnings.
He stood back from the altar and crossed himself, checking that the new candles were straight in their holders. Wax candles were expensive and the rest of the church was lit by cheap tallow dips, pieces of cord floating in a dish of ox-fat. He took the remnants of the altar candles home to use in his small room where he read his religious books until the small hours.
He turned from the altar to the body of the church, and surveyed the empty nave in the dim flickering light. This was where his flock would stand on Sunday for him to harangue them about their horrific sojourn in eternity. There were no seats, apart from stone benches around the walls for the old and infirm.
Below the window slits some old tapestries depicted saints and scenes from the scriptures, but his pride and joy were the new wall-paintings alongside the chancelarch and on the west wall. He had paid to have parts of the rough masonry plastered and then had begun to paint lurid scenes from the Fiery Pit. Horned devils with tridents, cloven-hoofed goblins, loathsome serpents and misshapen ogres inflicted every imaginable torment on screaming wretches — among whom naked females seemed to predominate. He had recently discovered in himself a hitherto unsuspected artistic talent. Within the last couple of months, he had filled the plastered areas with these diabolical murals and had only one space left to fill, on the right of the chancel arch, which he had already started upon. Space was becoming so short that he had begun to add smaller figures and faces to the existing murals, so that some were a writhing mass of miniature agonised sinners and their tormenting imps.
For a few moments he contemplated his dimly visible masterpieces, seeming to draw a little consolation from their threatening message, then picked up his mantle from the floor and went out into the street. Father Adam slammed the door behind him, then toiled in the dark up the terraces of Stepcote Hill to his dwelling and his frugal supper.