Looking about him, Simon prayed that this unruly host wouldn’t find them on their way to the island. He wondered how the two of them had fared.
It took Baldwin and William a little while to find a boat, but once they had spoken to a surly old man with a face burned all but black from a life out on the sea, they were soon off.
‘This is the island of St Elidius,’ William said.
He was sitting forward of Baldwin in the little boat, while the ancient man rowed without comment, as though he had seen too many people come here for him to worry himself. For his part, William was sitting keenly eyeing the little place as they drew nearer.
‘This place is good for the abbey. It generates quite a good revenue from pilgrims and shipping. Any vessels which come here for water and provisions can have what they want, but they pay a heavy toll,’ William said, indicating the broad sweep of water.
Baldwin looked about him with interest. The water was growing more rough, as though restless, and looked a great deal deeper. ‘Just here?’
‘Yes. It’s called many things, sometimes just the Priory Pool, because the Priory makes so much from it. If Ranulph could, he would take this. It is a profitable port, worth as much as all the customs on Ennor. I always called it the Pool of St Elidius, though. This is all his land. Or so I believe.’
He had a fanatic’s expression on his face, a mingling of fervour and spiritual excitement. Baldwin thought he looked like a stuffed frog. ‘Who was St Elidius?’
‘He was the son of a Cornish King, a Bishop and confessor. He came here many years ago to build his church, and he remains here, buried under his own altar. His feast day is only recently past.’
Baldwin was struck by the look of the island. It was not so vast as Ennor or St Nicholas, but it was a good-sized place, with a soft-looking southern shoreline with lots of sand. It stretched far to left and right before them, and Baldwin was struck by the sense of peace here.
‘He was a good man,’ the taciturn rower told them. ‘He helped the people here while he lived, and he still does now he’s dead.’
‘There are several pilgrims each year,’ William agreed. ‘They come from Cornwall, of course; St Elidius is not known elsewhere.’
‘I had not heard of him,’ Baldwin admitted. ‘So there are many people travelling to this island all the year round?’
‘Not so many now,’ William said.
‘No one much since Luke came here,’ the rower spat. ‘He’s not like you, Father.’
‘Come now,’ William said, unhappy to hear a member of a congregation criticising his own priest. ‘He was as good as he could be, but sometimes a man will follow the wrong path and things fail. I am sure Luke tried to be a good man, but a place like this, with so few islanders, well … It was more like a hermitage for him than a church with its own flock, wasn’t it? I don’t think you should blame him for his weaknesses, however many they may have been.’
‘You forgive if you want,’ the boatman said. ‘Me, I’ll not forget how he used to look at my daughter.’
Baldwin smiled to hear that. It was the way of such men that their grudges were harboured long and kept fresh by constant reminders to themselves of the iniquities of others.
‘Tell me,’ he said to the rower, ‘are there many people living on the island?’
‘No, sir. Most moved away during the famine, and few have returned. Most are on St Nicholas and Ennor, and a few on Bechiek. St Elidius suffered from the rains, and now it’s all but deserted, except by the priest at the church.’
When William and Baldwin had hopped from the boat into warm, shallow water, William led Baldwin enthusiastically up the shore until they were into a thick scrubby area of gorse. Here they turned up the slight incline to a little-used path.
‘My heaven!’ Baldwin exclaimed as he topped a low hill.
Before him was the enclosure. A group of three small huts connected by a low wall for protection, and a small round cell on the left. Beyond, inside the wall, was the church.
‘It’s a good size,’ William said proudly. ‘Some twenty-six by fourteen feet. Enough for most of the people from St Nicholas, when they wanted to come to visit. Sometimes they did.’
‘Who would come here to talk to you?’
William gave him a look from under grim brows. ‘Often it would be Tedia — while I was here and at St Mary’s too, but not for the reason that Luke invited her. When I was here, she came to ask me for help, and I would pray with her, at her side, to try to give her the courage and support she needed so badly. And then a man like Luke arrives, and all that’s out the window. Damn his black soul, the pustulent streak of piss!’
He took Baldwin to the western edge of the wall, where there was a little gate. It flapped open in the wind, and Baldwin stepped around it carefully, looking for signs of a man having walked past here on his way to kill, or returning from killing, Luke. ‘There’s nothing to see here,’ he said. ‘The ground is too stony. If there were some marks, they have been blown or washed away.’
‘So he died before the storm?’
‘Prior Cryspyn told us that it rained last night,’ Baldwin noted, touching the leaves of a plant near the gate. His fingers came away damp. ‘Yes, it clearly did. Which means that any bloodstains or marks could have been washed away by now. No matter, we shall have to do the best we can, that is all.’
‘Yes,’ William said, mournfully walking to the church. ‘I shall just see whether my chapel has been defiled.’
Baldwin smiled. The man was a single-minded fanatic when it came to this island, plainly. When William had disappeared, Baldwin himself walked about the enclosure, studying every part of the ground with interest, but finding nothing.
Luke had been no gardener, that much was plain. The little beds in which plants had grown were infested with weeds; the grassed lawns were long and rank, unkempt as a peasant’s hair during the harvest when he was living in the fields for days at a time. At the far edge of the church’s land there was a garden which should have provided all the sustenance a priest should need, but that too was a mess. It was almost as though the man had decided that he was not going to be here on the island for too long. There was no need of cultivation.
Baldwin walked around the outside of the church once more, and then opened the great door and entered.
The walls were covered in rich paintings, all scenes from the life of Christ. Baldwin recognised the largest, which showed Him being tempted by the devil in the wilderness. It caught his attention immediately: a thin, painfully hungry Jesus, a black-faced demon at his shoulder, showing all forms of earthly delights, and the Son of God recoiling in revulsion.
‘It took me an age, that one,’ Baldwin heard.
William was behind him. He stepped forward, a glow of pride on his face, and pointed out the details. ‘You’d never believe how hard it was to make the face so realistic, especially the devil’s! That was dreadful. I had to make fourteen shades of black for it. Every time I tried to use charcoal in oil or anything, the colours didn’t work.’
‘Did you paint all these?’ Baldwin asked, but there was no need. The similarity of each face told of the skill and pleasure of the artist, and proved that one man had painted them all.
‘Who else could have done them? When I arrived here, there was nothing. And then, when I started painting, I couldn’t stop. The only pleasure for me, moving to St Mary’s, is that at least I managed to finish this first.’
‘The one of Jesus Christ being tempted is most striking.’
William grinned suddenly. ‘And what could be more realistic here than a man tempted by all manner of pleasures, when he lives on a rock in the middle of the ocean like this, eh? All the people who visit here go to that one first; even pilgrims come and stare before going to the altar. Yes, it’s done its job well enough.’
At the eastern end, there were two altars of moorstone. One was in the main part of the church, but beside it, the north wall had two rounded arches leading to an aisle. Both had platforms for their altars, and Baldwin and William knelt awhile in prayer, and then Baldwin insisted on visiting the cell where Luke had lived.