House of Shadows Read online

Today there was a dank mist rather than a dense fog, and when they reached Bermondsey the priory loomed eerily though the haze, like a grey fortress perched on the edge of the bog that stretched down to the river. As the porter let them in, even the unimaginative de Wolfe gave a shiver that was not altogether due to the biting cold. At noon they ate again in the guests’ refectory, now empty of the boisterous pilgrims who had gone on their way to Canterbury. In the warming room afterwards, Thomas timidly asked his master how they were going to proceed with the investigation.

  ‘The prior says that today all these people who were with Christina will be here to attend the funeral tomorrow,’ replied John.

  That morning he had asked Robert Northam about the disposal of the body and had been told that the Beaumonts had already requested that Christina be interred in the priory cemetery, as ten days after death it was already impracticable to take the remains back to Derbyshire.

  ‘I will question them all in turn and try to get some sense of their feelings for the victim and where they were the night on which she was killed,’ he grimly told his clerk. ‘And today I’m going to twist a few arms in this place, see if I can squeeze some information from the Cluniacs.’

  Knowing of Gwyn’s fondness for kitchens, he told the big Cornishman to haunt the servants’ domain and see if any useful gossip could be gleaned. The more menial tasks in a religious house like Bermondsey were carried out both by lay brothers, who, though they had taken no vows, wore the habit and the tonsure, as well as by ordinary servants, who either lived in the priory or came in daily from nearby cottages. Gwyn, an amiable but cunning fellow, was adept at befriending these lower ranks of society and could be trusted to ferret out any local scandals.

  Thomas de Peyne had a similar gift, but one that worked best on clerks and priests like himself. Though now restored to grace as a priest, he had spent three years in the purgatory of being unfrocked, after a false accusation of indecent behaviour with a girl pupil in the cathedral school at Winchester. Before being reinstated, he had on a number of occasions helped the coroner by masquerading as a priest to worm his way into the confidence of various ecclesiastics. John now sent him on a similar expedition around the priory, a task in which Thomas revelled, as it allowed him to steep himself in the atmosphere and rituals of a religious house. He made first for the church, to attend vespers, then paraded around the cloister, talking to some of the monks as they perambulated around the garth.

  Meanwhile, de Wolfe went to the dormitory and sought out Brother Ferdinand and made several requests, the first of which was a room in which to interview witnesses, and the second a view of the chambers in which Christina de Glanville had been lodged. The olive-complexioned monk took him along from the cubicle where John slept, to the head of the stairs and, with a key selected from a large ring hanging on his girdle, opened a door on the other side of the upper landing.

  ‘This is where she resided, together with her friend Margaret and their two maids,’ he said in Norman-French that carried a tinge of an accent that John guessed was the Langue d’Oc of southern France. He stood aside to let the coroner into a short corridor with two doors. Each opened into a vestibule that had a mattress, which opened into a larger room with better furnishings, the palliasses being raised on low plinths, with several tables and some leather-backed folding chairs, as well as tall cupboards for clothing.

  ‘This first one was where Lady Christina stayed and in the next was her friend, Mistress Courtenay. Their tirewomen slept in the outer part,’ added Ferdinand somewhat needlessly. ‘All the more important guests ate in a separate dining room near the inner gate, where further accommodation is situated.’

  De Wolfe looked around the rooms and saw no signs of occupation. ‘What happened to her possessions, her clothing and personal effects?’

  ‘Her guardians, the Beaumonts, took everything last week. They are lodged near Bishopsgate, I understand, but I had a message from the prior’s secretary this morning to say that they are returning here tonight, ready for the funeral tomorrow.’

  Ferdinand ushered de Wolfe out and locked up, then took him down to the ground floor of the cellarer’s building, where one of the small offices next to the guests’ refectory was given to him for an interview room. A bare cell with a shuttered window-opening, it had a table, a bench and two hard chairs.

  ‘I will see that a charcoal brazier is brought in when you need to use this, Sir John,’ offered the monk and made as if to leave the coroner to his own devices.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ commanded de Wolfe. ‘I need to speak to everyone who was in contact with the dead girl, and that includes you.’

  Ferdinand stopped and slowly returned to the centre of the room. ‘There is little I can tell you, sir,’ he said quietly, the dark eyes in his almond-shaped face searching the forbidding features of the coroner.

  ‘Did she seem happy and excited at the prospect of her wedding? To most young women, this would be the most important day of her life.’

  The monk remained impassive. ‘I really cannot say, coroner. She did not appear to be effusive over it, but I had little chance to observe her.’

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  ‘At the evening meal on that day. I usually look in on the small dining room set aside for special guests to check that all is well. The whole party was there, eating and drinking, including Lady Christina.’

  ‘Was Jordan de Neville there?’

  ‘He was. He ate his supper and later went back to Southwark with his squire.’

  De Wolfe was hard put to think of any more questions for this silent man, but he tried a new tack. ‘Tell me, does Brother Ignatius have any peculiarities, so to speak? An unwelcome comment fell from his lips in the basement when we were examining the corpse.’

  John expected another stonewall denial, but surprisingly Ferdinand’s impassive face creased into a smile.

  ‘Ah, you mean his strange obsession?’ he asked. ‘My fellow monk is something of a mystic. He regularly sees devils, angels and witches, though he is harmless enough and is an excellent support for our good prior.’

  The coroner scowled at this rather dismissive opinion about a weird streak in the chaplain. ‘What does that have to do with the dead lady?’ he demanded.

  Ferdinand spread out his hands, palms upwards. ‘He was convinced that she was a witch, sir! He claimed that she was left-handed, had a fondness for the storeroom cats and had long lobes to her ears or some such nonsense. He often made strange claims about visitors – and even our own inmates. He was convinced that our lay brother who used to tend the pigs was a reincarnation of Pontius Pilate!’

  ‘What happened to him?’ growled de Wolfe.

  ‘He drowned in the marshes outside last year,’ replied Ferdinand blandly.

  Further questions produced nothing of use and the monk departed, leaving John sitting in irritable frustration at his table. A servant brought in an iron brazier in which charcoal glowed dully, sending a moderate heat into the room, together with some acrid fumes. In spite of the warmth, John felt chilled and, though of an unimaginative nature, he realized that where he sat was just above where the corpse of Christina de Glanville lay in her box of ice. Eventually he rose and, with an illogical feeling of relief, left the room and went across the cloister to the prior’s house, where he found Ignatius in his little office, busy writing on a scroll of parchment. He stood over the secretary and spoke without any preamble.

  ‘I understand that you had certain convictions about Lady Christina. Is that true?’

  The lean monk stared up at him, a sullen expression on his face. ‘I don’t know what you mean, Sir John,’ he answered gruffly.

  ‘You thought she was a witch,’ snapped the coroner. ‘Did you do her any harm?’

  Ignatius jumped up, his sallow cheeks suddenly flushed. ‘She was an acolyte of He with the Cloven Hooves!’ he brayed. ‘But I did nothing to her; it was not my place. God will settle all such matters on the Day of Judgement!’


  ‘Are you sure that you didn’t give Him a helping hand?’ suggested John, thrusting his menacing face closer to the monk’s. ‘Where were you late on the night when she went missing?’

  Ignatius looked around him wildly, as if hoping the prior would appear to save him from this avenging angel, though de Wolfe looked more like a clovenhoofed acolyte at the moment.

  ‘My opinions about certain persons go no further than speculation and prayer, Crowner! I had no hand in her death. Why should I?’

  De Wolfe recalled a situation in Exeter some months earlier and a phrase from the Scriptures came to his mind. ‘Does not the Vulgate say “thou shall not suffer a witch to live”?’ he snarled.

  Ignatius paled and stuttered a reply: ‘The Book of Exodus does, yes – but I had no authority to intervene. I have detected a number of imps and devils and witches over the years, but it is not my place to banish them.’

  A door opened across the passage and the prior’s voice called out for his secretary. John did not wish to expose Ignatius to any trouble, in case his protestations of innocence were true, and went out to speak to Robert Northam.

  ‘When your former guests return tonight, I need to speak to all of them as a matter of some urgency. I have been provided with a room in the cellarer’s building and would be grateful if you could ask them to attend upon me there.’

  The prior nodded and motioned for John to enter his chamber, where the coroner had more questions. ‘I have heard rumours that not everyone was overjoyed at the prospect of this marriage. Have you any knowledge of this, prior?’

  Northam sighed and tapped his fingers restlessly on his table. ‘You will no doubt find out when you talk to them, though it may take some prising from their lips,’ he said. ‘Firstly, Roger Beaumont has a daughter, Eleanor, by his first wife, now dead. She had set her cap at Jordan de Neville, and the king’s insistence on him marrying Christina was by no means welcome to her – nor I suspect to her father and stepmother.’

  ‘Because of the loss of their exploitation of the Glanville estates when Christina delivered them to her new husband?’ queried John.

  ‘That and the fact that, instead, Eleanor might have married into the Neville family, who are rising stars in the nobility, with extensive lands in the north.’

  The prior seemed to have no more gossip about his guests, and John wondered where a senior man of the cloth had unearthed this titbit about Eleanor Beaumont. He suspected that his chaplain-secretary was the channel for such hearsay.

  Leaving Robert Northam’s quarters, he went back to the warming room, as he wished to spend as little time as possible in the dank, inimical chamber above Christina’s corpse. He sat there for some time and eventually dozed off, joining two old monks who were snoring their way through the afternoon. The return of Gwyn and Thomas woke him up, and they thankfully warmed their icy feet and hands as they told him the meagre results of their spying mission.

  Thomas had been consorting with a few monks and senior clerks in the church, cloister and infirmary, which he had visited with the excuse that he wished to compare the priory’s facilities with those at similar religious houses in Devon.

  ‘There is a general consensus that Brother Ignatius is slightly mad, as he sees goblins and imps possessing many of the people who enter the priory. But it seems a harmless obsession and gives rise more to pitying jibes than to any real concern,’ reported the clerk.

  De Wolfe nodded agreement. ‘I have heard the same sort of comments about him. Doesn’t necessarily mean that he is harmless, though. Anything else?’

  The little clerk rubbed his hands together to warm them. ‘I raised the subject of the wedding and the death. There were many sidelong glances and shrugs. I got the impression that this marriage was well known to be a sombre affair rather than the usual happy event.’

  ‘What did they say about it, then?’ demanded the coroner.

  ‘I gathered, more from their attitudes than outright words, that the people gathered here as guests made little secret of the fact that this was a union forced on them by King Richard. I could get no more detail than that, though a clerk in the scriptorium claimed that he had seen this Jordan fellow ogling the bridesmaid Margaret.’

  Gwyn grunted confirmation of this. ‘The kitchen servants, where I went seeking some fresh bread and cheese, said much the same thing when I brought the conversation around to it. They have long noses and sharp eyes – they suggested that though Jordan fancied this Courtenay woman, it was Roger’s daughter who wanted him.’

  De Wolfe pondered their words for a moment. ‘This is something I must pursue with these grand folk who are coming here tonight. Though why the bride should be killed to avoid a wedding is beyond me at the moment.’

  Thomas rather hesitantly raised another matter. ‘Crowner, several of the brothers to whom I spoke muttered words about history repeating itself. I tried to worm more out of them, but they were very reluctant to answer. All I could gather was that there is some vague legend about the early years of this priory, when another king’s ward vanished.

  ‘I asked one of the oldest monks, Brother Martin, who is in charge of the scriptorium, but he said it was idle tittle-tattle. He claimed there was nothing in the priory archives to show that anyone had disappeared and blamed Ignatius for encouraging the belief that the place was haunted by the spirits of devils and incubi!’

  ‘God’s guts, what’s that got to do with a girl getting killed last week?’ objected Gwyn.

  Thomas looked crestfallen, but John patted his shoulder. ‘Every bit of information may help, even if it only shows the mood of this place. I admit, it’s a cheerless house, even for a monastery!’

  Just before nightfall, a small cavalcade arrived at the priory. There were two curtained litters slung between pairs of horses, accompanied by several well-dressed men on caparisoned steeds and half a dozen mounted servants, leading several packhorses. In addition, there were three women sitting side-saddle on palfreys. With much jingling of harness, they trooped through the outer gates and dismounted near the entrance to the inner courtyard. One older lady was helped down from the first litter and two younger ones climbed from the other.

  The prior, his chaplain, Brother Ferdinand and several of the obidentiaries were there to receive them outside the door that led into the superior guest-rooms adjacent to the inner gatehouse, joining that to the cellarer’s building.

  For the better part of an hour, there was much coming and going as the guests were installed in their various chambers, together with their personal body-servants and luggage. Eventually the main players assembled in the refectory for wine and refreshments, where Prior Robert told them of the coroner’s presence and his requirement that they attend upon him in turn in his makeshift office along the corridor in the cellarium. There was some indignant grumbling about being ordered around by some knight from some outlandish place called Devon, but Robert Northam firmly impressed on them that it was on the direct order of the Chief Justiciar, and hence the king himself.

  After a flurry of messages conveyed by a couple of kitchen boys, some form of timetable was agreed and as darkness fell in the late-February afternoon John sat in his small room awaiting his first witness. He kept Thomas with him at a small table in the corner, supplied with pen, ink and parchment, ready to record anything of importance. Two three-branched candlesticks gave a fair light as Brother Ignatius shepherded in a large florid man in middle age.

  ‘Sir Roger Beaumont,’ announced the monk. ‘A noble baron of Wirksworth Castle in Derbyshire.’ He declaimed this as if he was herald at a coronation, as de Wolfe rose and courteously motioned the new arrival to the chair opposite his table. Roger grunted a reluctant greeting and sat down, revealing himself as a square-faced man with a high colour, his bushy grey eyebrows matching his bristly grey hair, which was shaved up to a line level with his ears in the old Norman fashion. He was dressed in fine though soberhued clothes, a long brown tunic under a green surcoat, all covered with a f
ur-lined pelisse of heavy black wool.

  ‘This is a bad business, coroner,’ he boomed, his voice suiting his burly appearance, heavy-boned and short-necked. John guessed his age as middle forties, a few years older than himself.

  After a few formal exchanges, de Wolfe went straight into the meat of the matter and went through the history of Roger’s guardianship of Christina, confirming what he knew from others.

  ‘You were on good terms with the lady?’ he asked ‘She was like another daughter to us, for we have Eleanor, who is a few years older.’ Roger had a forthright, almost aggressive manner, sticking out his jaw pugnaciously even when the subject matter was not controversial.

  John avoided mentioning the prior’s suggestion that this girl was a competitor for Jordan’s hand in marriage and went on to ask about the night she died.

  ‘I saw nothing of her after supper,’ said Roger abruptly. ‘My wife and I were accommodated where we are now. The two girls, Christina and Margaret Courtenay, were lodged upstairs. The first I knew of the tragedy was in the morning, when all hell was let loose on finding the poor maid’s body.’

  ‘Was she looking forward to her nuptials – excited and happy?’

  Beaumont rubbed his square jaw. ‘Not all that keenly, to be honest, but the king’s command and perhaps her feelings of duty to her late father to preserve his estates overcame her personal desires.’

  ‘And the bridegroom? What of him?’ asked de Wolfe.

  Roger scowled at the question. ‘You had better ask him that, but I suspect he would rather have plighted his troth elsewhere.’ He refused to be drawn as to where ‘elsewhere’ might have been, saying bluntly that it was Jordan’s business, not his.

  ‘With Christina dead, what will happen to her fortune?’

  The baron shifted uneasily and his face became even more ruddy. ‘Effectively, the king has acquired her estates. I am merely the caretaker. But perhaps in view of my faithful stewardship, he might allow me to purchase the manors myself, as I know their management so well.’