“You are kind, brother.” Thomas stood and looked down at the small monk. “But you look as if you are in pain. Are you ill?”
Andrew snorted. “My leg. It distresses me when the air turns chill or damp. I am used to it, although I still have little patience despite much prayer. Sister Anne has remedies which ease the aches.”
“Surely you are too young for an old man’s pains,” Thomas said, grinning.
“They are from an old wound, brother, gotten in a battle for a cause which died with its leader but not, perhaps, in the spirits of men.”
“You have returned from the Holy Land then?”
“Nay. I was with Simon de Montfort and should have died on the field from my wounds. Or else been hanged, drawn, and quartered as a traitor to King Henry.”
“My apologies, brother. I should not have pried.”
Andrew looked up at Thomas and laughed, eyes sparkling with good humor. “Nor would I have told you except you remind me much of the man who gave me this bad leg and then saved me from a traitor’s death by granting my wish to retire from the world. He was an earl who fought on King Henry’s side, but he showed a knight’s compassion toward this humble man whom he deemed a worthy opponent in face to face combat. Oh, but he was a fine fighter!” The monk smiled at the memory. “Indeed, you have his voice, his look and his breadth, although not his coloring. Strange, that.”
Thomas felt his face turn cold, then blazing hot.
“Methinks I, too, have pricked an old wound? But fear not, brother. You may keep your secrets. It is part of the human condition to have something buried deep in the heart, and we monks of Tyndal are no different from any other mortal man in that.”
“Even Prior Theobald?” Thomas asked, his laugh harsh with fear at the monk’s quick perceptions. It would be wise, he decided, to maneuver the conversation into safer and more profitable areas. Indeed, that earl might well have been Thomas’ own father.
“Even he, although his more spirited sins must now be as shriveled as ancient husks. We are used to his failings, yet respect his office and, out of kindness, pretend that all orders are his rather than issuing from others with his voice. I am not alone in feeling only pity for him.”
“Others being Brother Simeon?”
“A man of great competence and perhaps even greater ambition, but the latter serves both the priory and God well. We may lose him one day to Amesbury. If God is kind, he may stay with us and become prior here when Prior Theobald is called to Heaven.”
“Then surely Brother Receiver has no dark secrets.”
Andrew folded his arms and lowered his head. “His ambition for advancement within the Church is no secret, but he exercises a shrewd humility. Although Brother Simeon has long ruled us here at Tyndal, he gives credit for everything he does to our prior. Such humility will serve him well with others of higher rank who would profit from competence in underlings but wish the glory to fall on themselves. No, if our receiver has a secret, it may be his grief. He once said that he admired his father above all other men, but less than two years ago, his father died. Brother Simeon was inconsolable for many months. We feared he would lose either his reason or his faith. Once in chapel I overheard him praying that the cup be taken from him. Apparently, God was gracious. The good brother has since regained his spirit and strength.”
“He does not seem happy with our new prioress.”
“Prioress Felicia was not a forceful leader. She was happiest working with the nuns or the hospital and let Brother Simeon run the estates as well as rule the monks and lay brothers on Prior Theobald’s behalf. Prioress Eleanor seems more in the tradition of Fontevraud women. He will find the change difficult.”
“And what think you of being ruled by a woman?”
Andrew chuckled. “Our new prioress, despite her youth, reminds me much of my own mother. Now there was a woman who knew how to order about the sons of Adam! And we all loved her, we did, including my father. This will be no change for me, brother. It is like going home.”
***
Thomas knelt in solitude on the rough stones of the darkening Jesus Chapel, the monks’ private place of prayer on the left of the church nave. The boy’s death earlier that day had dug into his soul like a dark-hued worm, and he needed a comfort no mortal could give.
But he could not pray; his thoughts hugged the earth with a fierce tenacity. In truth, he had been unable to pray since the day he was thrown face down on the slimy straw of that rotting dungeon floor. After his release and transfer to Grovebury, a downy-cheeked priest had told him that failure at prayer proved Satan’s hand clutched his soul. He advised Thomas to battle against such possession with the whip, the hair shirt and rejection of all earthly desires. Although he had smiled with some acidity at the young priest’s naïveté, he did feel as if some malign force was crushing all spark of light from his spirit. And so he did try them, the whip and hair shirt, but they had accomplished nothing.
If Satan was offering bribes for his soul, he was doing it in a very unorthodox manner. Thomas no longer suffered from fleshly passions. He did not lust after women, either when he was awake or during the vulnerability of sleep. He ate because food was placed before him but did so with neither hunger nor eagerness, and he drank only to keep his throat from drying to dust.
And as if some part of him was truly eager for it, he needed no awakening for prayer. Indeed he was grateful when they all shuffled down to the chapel for Matins. It was torture, lying motionless in his bed with neither thought nor action to pass the interminable black minutes before sunrise. Although his eyes burned and his body ached from lack of rest, it was during Matins when he felt nearest to prayer, surrounded by the warmth and breath of his brother monks.
Now he was alone. His prayers swirled briefly in the air like lightly disturbed dust before drifting to the floor as soon as he had said them. He dropped his hands, leaned back on his heels, and turned his thoughts to more worldly things.
Although he had been sent to Tyndal to test his investigative prowess in what would probably be a minor and temporary matter of priory insolvency, he found himself settling into the place as if it were a new home. Despite the desolate location, the inhabitants were much like the men he was used to, although some of those men now inhabited the bodies of women, he thought with a smile. An interesting twist on traditional views, for cert.
However, if he wished Tyndal to be the place where he could lift his spirits and refresh his soul, God had played an ugly joke on him. Instead of granting Thomas peace and distance from his tortured memories, God had greeted him with the sight of Brother Rupert’s horribly mutilated dead body before he had even spent a night within the priory walls. No matter that the murderer would be found eventually, Thomas would keep the image of Brother Rupert’s obscenely mangled corpse forever in his collection of night terrors, which visited him on those rare occasions when he actually slept.
Would that the murderer be quickly found! The idea that he might strike again in such a blasphemous way was a thought too macabre to live with. Despite the astute observations of Sister Anne and Thomas’ own discovery of the dead monk’s crucifix outside the sacristy, however, Crowner Ralf had yet to find more evidence and apprehend the culprit, secular or religious.
If only Thomas knew why the monk had been so treated, perhaps he could await the murderer’s capture with less terror, knowing how to protect himself from a similar fate. But he did not, and his imagination, colored with abnormal fatigue, sometimes let loose images of such ghoulish morbidity that he started at strange, demonic shapes he thought materialized in the shadows of his restless nights.
Thomas heard himself mewl like a babe in fear and he ground his hands into his eyes, forcing himself to turn his thoughts to the mundane task he had been sent to investigate. He took in a deep breath and just as slowly exhaled. With an exasperating sluggishness, calm returned to his overburdened soul.