Chapter Thirteen
Anoise had woken her. She lay still, trying to recognise it. It was light, maybe an hour after dawn. There it came again. A thin scraping sound. There was someone in the room with her.
She sat up slowly, looking around carefully and trying not to show fear. It was only Isabelle.
The child was on the floor near the door, Pol beside her, and she was scratching at the wall with a fingernail.
‘What are you doing in here? What do you want?’
She didn’t look up. Scratch, scratch, scratch.
‘Isabelle, you can’t just come in here whenever you want.’ Linnet felt obscurely annoyed that her fear was for nothing.
‘Everybody dies.’ She spoke in a flat, almost weary voice.
‘Well yes.’ Was she just simple after all?
‘I don’t care. I has Pol.’ Her hand crept away from the wall for a moment to stroke the bird’s head. He cawed affectionately and stretched his neck out.
‘Why are you talking to me about people dying? Is it about Brother Oswyn? I thought we talked about that, you didn’t—’
‘No.’ Her voice was still flat. ‘It’s Tom.’
Linnet shook off the last of her sleep. ‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s dead. He did it to hisself. I don’t care. Everybody dies.’ Scratch, scratch, scratch on the wall.
But Linnet was already running down to the outer courtyard where people were gathered, and she kept hearing Tom’s name. She tried to keep breathing but something solid was sitting on her chest.
She ran straight into the priest.
‘Can’t you ever look where you’re going?’ he spat at her.
She took a step backwards, words falling out of her like stones. Tom, dead? What was happening?
Cyrus looked her up and down slowly before answering. ‘Yes, your friend is gone. He’s sinned against God for the last time, hanging himself like that.’
Her shocked face must have stirred him to a little pity.
‘We all knew he were gaming away his money faster than he could fish for it. It’s no wonder the Devil caught him at his despair and he did for himself.’
‘Where—’
‘He’s in the tithe barn. The fishermen will be cutting him down soon. They’re not to bring him to me though, you tell them. I’ll not have a sinner like him in my churchyard.’
His last words were yelled after her as she was running again, away from the Priory towards the tithe barn, swept clean, half empty for this year’s harvest. It sat a short way off the road, solid and comforting. The door was half-open and she could hear voices inside, solemn and low.
She pushed her way in past the men, looking up quickly with horror at the swinging feet, the blackened face, the clumsy knot tying him to the beams, before she turned away.
‘Sir Cyrus says not to bring him to the church. Where will you take him? You won’t leave him—’ The words were coming out in a rush, as she tried to catch her breath.
‘No, no.’ One of the fishermen stopped her. ‘We’ll take care of him.’
‘And it’s Tom? It truly is Tom?’
She couldn’t bear to look up again, she’d seen nothing of the man she knew when she looked up. Was it someone else? Was Isabelle mistaken? Oh – Isabelle. Her heart lurched as she thought of the child huddled up against the wall.
‘Yes, yes it’s Tom.’ The same man, Peter, was talking to her kindly. ‘We’ll take care of him, he’ll be with us at the end.’
The walls of the barn felt like they were crushing against her and there were too many people. She started to leave but had a sudden thought.
‘Who found him?’
‘It were Isabelle, that child with the raven that runs around. She’d followed her bird here I’m guessing.’
She was outside again, standing with her feet touching the sea, looking out as if to see Tom on his boat, although she knew that couldn’t be.
She knew she needed to go to the child, comfort her, but she couldn’t move right now.
If she moved, she’d be travelling through the air and even the air felt like it would hurt her.
She didn’t know how long she was there but she saw the women coming up from the village, carrying a winding sheet. She saw the men carrying that sheet, solid with a man’s shape, back out into the thin, cold winter sunshine and place it down by the boats.
There was a low discussion, then the men began to carry it again, away from the beach, taking shovels with them.
She followed, she didn’t know why. They were walking the path between the island and the land, walking without speaking.
Following the tide as it receded. They set the sheet down and began to dig.
A phrase came to her. ‘Between the sea and the land.’ That’s where you buried someone who took his own life. And how right for a fisherman.
Back in the Priory, Linnet almost felt as though she were at sea, the floor rocking beneath her.
She’d looked everywhere for Isabelle but no one had seen her.
The monks were gossiping about the death but most hadn’t had much to do with Tom.
It was the sin, not the person they were talking of.
Not a friend. Oh God, had he done this to himself thinking she despised him? Guilt washed over her.
Godfreyd came out of a doorway rubbing his eyes and yawning.
If he’d worked late in the Infirmary, the Prior let him miss Prime for a little more sleep, something he took full advantage of.
She saw him look around at the gossiping monks, confused, and then watched his reaction as the information fully reached him.
His face revealed nothing but his hands were twisting the cord of his habit, over and over again.
‘Ah. A fisherman was it? A dicer? The devil finds those…’ He coughed and looked away. Was it his sin that had driven Tom to kill himself? She hated him then for his perverted desires which had corrupted the man she cared for, and she hated herself for the friendship she could no longer mend.
Benedict came to him and whispered something in his ear.
Godfreyd’s mask slipped slightly, and he pushed him away, hard, but Linnet couldn’t bring herself to care about the quarrels and botherings of the monks now.
As she was thinking this, Godfreyd looked up and caught her watching.
His eyes sharpened, glaring at her, demanding something from her.
Pol flew past and she followed him, out of the Priory gates up to the Heugh and onwards, clambering down the little bit of cliff there and across the wet sands and the slippery black rocks to Cuddy’s Island, where she saw Isabelle staring out to sea.
It was barely an island, just a lump of slightly bigger rock, and then the small shape of the child hunched up, surrounded by the sea and the sky.
She sat down next to her on the cold stones of the ruined chapel, the half walls providing a little shelter from the wind cutting across the sea. Pol butted the child’s hand gently again and again until she stroked him.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t understand what you were telling me before,’ Linnet said, putting out a hand to comfort her but withdrawing it as Pol hissed.
‘Sir Cyrus says he were a sinner. He were a sinner. It were self-killing. I hate him now.’
Isabelle’s words came out evenly, no emotion behind them at all.
‘He – he was our friend, Isabelle, wasn’t he?’
‘Friends don’t leave you.’
It was as if she had closed herself off. She seemed to have grown overnight and her face looked more pinched. She was older, a hard little soul in her small body now. The only sign of warmth, the hand on her raven.
‘Isabelle!’
The voice was loud, carrying across the waves, the Prior calling from the beach below the Heugh. They looked up.
‘Come now, Isabelle, and you too, Linnet. There’s work to be done for both of you.’
They picked their way back across the muddy causeway to the Holy Island and the Prior, the waters were rising and they were only just in time. The rocks were half-submerged and Isabelle slipped more than once, but although she must have hurt herself, she didn’t cry out.
Linnet worked on the last pages of the prayer book, shutting out everything except the clean lines and swoops of the ink on the page.
When her back ached or her wrist felt strained, and she was brought back to the room, Tom’s death overwhelmed her anew.
She pushed back hard to drive it from her thoughts and force herself to work.
Although her father’s work had been all about death, she’d been protected from it.
He carried rolls, in honour of the abbots or priors, and the monks wrote their prayers on them, but none of it meant anything to her.
They’d not seemed to mean much to the monks they met either, it was all about what prayer or turn of phrase they would add to the rolls, how they could show their best Latin and their best inks.
Her mother had died when she was small. She had no memory of her at all, just living with her father in Durham until she was big enough to travel with him.
She wondered sometimes if her father was dead.
Would she find out? A ship could sink, a horse could throw you.
Or someone could have killed him. Everybody dies.
Isabelle’s words came back to her again.
There was a cough from the doorway, Linnet jumped, her pen skidding across the page and making marks she didn’t intend. It was Brother Luke.
‘The Prior told me to come and you would show me the prayer book,’ he said.
She sighed and then stood up to let him come closer to the desk, welcoming the chance to keep her mind away from what grieved her.
‘It’s nearly finished but you can see how I mark the lines first to keep the words level.’
He looked interested, bending down to look more closely at her writing. He was young, only on the island some months. She’d not spent much time with him before.
‘What are those words by themselves on the bottom of the page?’
‘Those? They’re catchwords, to show how to put the quires together, it’s the first word on the next page that follows on from this one when it’s all sewn together.’
Linnet kept her catchwords small, almost hiding at the bottom of her page. Some trimmed theirs off after the manuscript was bound, some made a spectacle of them, little rabbits on horseback carrying a pennant with the word, or a dog chasing it like a squirrel.
She gave him a scrap of parchment and a nearly worn-out pen and told him to try the Pater Noster on it.
He would have to make his own pens soon too.
After she had scraped off her errors, she started on some new gall oak ink as she would need more in a few weeks.
Grinding the oak galls again and again, finer and finer, letting the movement take over from thought.
She lit a candle – one of the ones she’d stolen from Brother Oswyn, and the Scriptorium became a warm, small place of safety. Peaceful working, no talking, no thought beyond what they were making.
Suddenly Godfreyd was there and it felt like the world outside was crashing in, like waves on the shore. She saw his face was stern and sour as he told Luke to go to the Infirmary.
‘But the Prior said I was to learn from Linnet to do the—’
‘You’re practising script, aren’t you? You can do that with my physyk book – I need some herb names entered there.’
Luke left obediently following in the wake of the taller monk as he swept out of the room.
The peace shattered, Linnet went to get some food. The kitchen was unusually quiet. Tom had been well liked. People touched each other lightly on shoulders and nodded but there wasn’t a lot of talk. Three deaths in such a short time had made them uneasy.
‘Where’s Isabelle?’ she asked Ann.
‘The Prior has her doing something for that duck of his.’ Ann rolled her eyes. The kitchen women didn’t think much of making pets of food.
Jack sat down next to her, forcing her to make herself smaller to give him room. She dropped her eyes quickly but he was pressing his elbows up close as he tore into his food.
‘Pity about your man Tom,’ he said, mouth open and chewing. ‘Still, he should have known his bounds, dicing with us.’
She stopped herself saying what she wanted to throw back at him. Remember, Linnet not Mary.
‘Did you win all his money then?’ she asked mildly, with what he took for admiration.
‘No, he had plenty more – he were still moneyed after he paid us back. Wouldn’t have lasted, mind.’
‘So he hadn’t lost all his money?’ Maybe it was the sinning with Godfreyd that had driven him to despair after all.
‘Nah – I said. He had more.’
Jack was tired of talking about Tom and his money, but talking to Linnet had him thinking about Mary again.
‘You’re not related to a Mary are ye? You do look awful like her.’
‘No, only my mother long dead,’ she said quickly. Everyone had at least one Mary in their family.
‘Only that Mary I was telling ye about, she could scribe a little too, and I fancy it were Guy who had taught her.’
Linnet had taught Guy everything he knew. She bit back on saying that. They didn’t let others know, much safer for him to be the one everyone knew and paid.
‘My father and the monks we met taught me to scribe,’ she said. Stick to the truth as best she could. ‘From when I was a small girl, scraps of parchment and small feathers.’
He didn’t really care, grunting and turning back to his food. He was still taking up more than his space on the bench though, his legs spread, one pressing against her, and Linnet finished off quickly to be gone.
The door to the Prior’s parlour was open.
She looked in as she went past. Isabelle was crooning gently to the duck, her face still numb but her body more relaxed.
The Prior was in his chair, eyes shut, his fingers tapping on the side of the chair in time to the child’s crooning, a tear or two falling unnoticed down his face.