Of course, I was at one with Wilfred in hoping it hadn’t been him. It wasn’t that I shared any of his sense of scandal that a man of the Church could be urging on our destruction. Rather, it was the endless range of possibilities – all equally disturbing – that would be raised from admitting that Edward might not have been mistaken.
‘Very well,’ I said, trying to look unrattled, ‘let us allow that it might have been Brother Joseph. I know more of his background than you do, and he would not have been out of place where Edward believes he saw him.’ I was now thinking aloud. An audience even of boys made for more connected thought than if I’d withdrawn to my cot with a flask of heated wine. I motioned them into their now usual places at the table, and closed my eyes to fight off the returning tiredness.
‘Edward,’ I asked, trying to sound in control of things, ‘I will ask you again if your kinsman Hrothgar told you anything about the details of my abduction. I want you to think hard and tell me anything you know. Anything – no matter how trivial you may think it – may be of use in our present circumstances.’
‘He wasn’t really my kinsman,’ Edward replied slowly. ‘He took me on after my parents died of the sweating pestilence.’
I thought back. England is a wretchedly unhealthy place, and there isn’t a year without something nasty to thin the population. But the epidemic he mentioned had touched Jarrow two years earlier. That might in itself have been interesting. I sat forward. ‘Did you know him before he took over your care?’ I asked.
The boy shook his head. Hrothgar had arrived in the village a few days after most of the people there had died. He’d carefully inspected all the surviving boys before giving food and drink to Edward alone. He’d then paid for some kind of education from a drunken hermit before pushing him in the direction of our monastery.
‘Would it shock you,’ I asked again, ‘if I supposed Hrothgar had chosen you for a scheme he already had in mind?’
Again, he shook his head. Between beatings, there had been some regard between them, but no real affection. He accepted that his childhood had ended with that visit of the pestilence. From that moment, he’d been simply the instrument of a stranger’s will.
‘He promised me that I’d see the world,’ Edward told me. I let my face soften for a moment before pulling it back into my pitiless stare. ‘He said I’d see cities paved with gold and silver, where no rain ever fell, and where food was given to all who were hungry.’
With the partial exception of this last, that didn’t sound like the Empire I knew. But I continued probing. Had he ever collaborated with Brother Joseph? Had he been given any indication that Joseph might be part of Hrothgar’s plan?
‘He beat me when I didn’t understand his triangles,’ came the reply. ‘He called me a moron, and said he’d get me thrown out of the monastery.’
Wilfred nodded in support. Brother Joseph, he added, had believed that Euclidian geometry was not only self-evidently true, but also intuitively known – with a little beating – to anyone but the mentally deficient.
I’d get round to asking more about Joseph. I’d often been puzzled how the most reasonable of men could turn, in front of a few dozen schoolboys, into a gloating tyrant. For the moment, it was enough to know that, if there had been more than one conspiracy afoot in Jarrow, they had been entirely separate. I’d already extracted from Edward confirmation of what I’d already guessed – that there had been two separate attacks on the monastery. Hrothgar had turned up with his own men to find others already in place. There had been an argument and then a fight in which the Chieftain had been killed. None of the survivors of the Chieftain’s band had been in the know about what was going on, and those who didn’t go back across the sea in their own boat had joined willingly enough in Hrothgar’s mission. Edward had been told nothing of any timings. His instructions were simply to wait on events. It would never do to call in the crew for questioning. In any event, they too were on a need-to-know basis. If Hrothgar had not set out with any pilot, was that because the other attack had forced him to bring everything forward? If only Edward had been able to answer my questions…
That’s one of the problems of need-to-know conspiracies. The advantage is that they’re much harder to discover. You can catch the agents. Even under torture, they can generally say nothing of the principals. On the other hand, given any space of time or distance such conspiracies can turn very brittle. Here, there had been immense spaces of both, and just about everything had gone wrong.
When the two boys were alone with each other, they might recall or infer something else. For the moment, I’d got out of them all they had to give. There was a burst of wild shouting on the deck outside, and the ship gave a sudden shudder as if it had hit something. But if the shouting continued, the ship resumed its headlong race before the still rising winds. Whatever else was happening outside, we didn’t seem likely to sink. Without thinking to point at it and look helpless, I bent creakily down and took my wine cup from where it had been rolling on the floor. I looked round for something to put in it. No luck there. I sighed, and fought to summarise our present state of knowledge.
‘It seems reasonable to believe,’ I opened, ‘that Hrothgar was engaged at least two years ago to supervise my abduction from the monastery. It is possible that the Master of the Offices in Constantinople was behind this. It’s the sort of coup that got him preferment in the first place. This could have run parallel with a later change of heart by Constantine himself – he did send that delegation the Easter before last with promises of full rehabilitation that I’m not inclined to disbelieve. Now that Constantine is dead – or just out of power – his heir Justinian may have decided against having me back and sent orders to have me killed. That would explain the earlier attack on the monastery that Hrothgar foiled.’
‘So Brother Joseph was working with the first group to have you killed?’ Wilfred asked. He ran trembling fingers through his hair and looked for a moment as if he might start vomiting blood again.
I supposed he was still coming to terms with such enormity from a man of God. I shrugged. In truth, though, I’d had Cuthbert in mind for this. I thought again of that sealed packet of documents he’d had hidden away. I wished I’d opened it when I had the chance. Would they have explained his eagerness to get the gate open? Was he the insider for that failed attack? If so, I didn’t see any evidence for contact with Edward beyond the carnal. Nor could I think of any evidence that suggested cooperation with Joseph.
And Joseph was the hard one to explain. Hrothgar and Cuthbert made sense within the hypothesis. Each was certainly or probably attached to one of the two bands of raiders. I knew one was there to capture me. I guessed the other was there to help get me killed. But what had Joseph been up to? If Edward was right, he’d just now been trying to kill me. Yet if he’d wanted me dead in Jarrow he had only to put something in my drink, or press a folded cloth into my face as I slept.
Of course, if there had been two conspiracies, each with different principals, there might easily have been three. And once these things came in contact, there was no predicting or even explaining their course. But this was the sort of tangled web that I’d seen long before, when Phocas was Emperor, or in the early days of Heraclius. If this was how the Imperial Secret Service worked now, it was evident that my own reforms had gone backwards since my departure.
I took my wig off again and scratched. I noticed both boys still looking expectantly at me – as if they believed I could explain everything to them as neatly and authoritatively as I might in class with some difficulty of word order in Horace. I smiled and dabbed at my nose – thin snot, I was glad to say, not blood.