Chapter Sixteen
The Prior looked at her attentively as she dipped her finest brush into the pot.
She’d thinned the paste he’d brought in with a little egg white.
It smelled strange, but not unpleasant. She swept it across a tiny corner of the test parchment.
They both looked at it carefully, the Prior moving the candle closer.
Linnet felt disappointed. Where was the beautiful glowing blue? Had the pedlar tricked the Prior? The Prior didn’t look angry, just thoughtful.
‘Ah well, nearly there. Just needs a bit more from the other packet, I reckon,’ he said.
She didn’t know much about lapis but she offered to look at the powders and help him. The Prior brushed that aside.
‘We’ll try again tomorrow.’
‘What about if we leave it to stand overnight?’
He shook his head, he didn’t think it would make a difference and she didn’t either. The muddy colour had no hope of becoming sparkling. Light colours could go darker, it was rare for them to go the other way.
The Inspector stood at the door, beckoning the Prior away, indifferent to the finer points of the manuscripts they were talking about.
How much longer was he going to be here anyway?
How long did inspections usually take? The monks had been strictly pious since he came but perhaps he was staying so long to catch them at their ease.
Linnet had only known Inspectors to stay a few days at most, but he’d been here over two weeks now.
They surely couldn’t keep it going for that much longer.
Luke looked at the little mark of blue. ‘What’s wrong with that? It’s a lovely colour.’
‘Not proper shining lapis,’ she explained. ‘It almost needs to glow like gilt.’
She found it hard to put into words the glory that the lapis could convey.
They got back to their preparations, Luke refining his pens ready to start the text of the Gospels, Linnet drawing out her first ideas for the pictures.
She’d seen a window in Ely Cathedral with Jesus walking on the Sea at Galilee, and she wanted to copy that on a full page in her book.
The boats she was drawing looked like the fishermen’s boats on the island, stubby and solid, working boats.
Perhaps she could add a bit of Tom? She took special care over the nets, working in the patterns she’d studied by the shore.
Yes, the pattern of his nets would be in the Gospel, her own tribute to him for years to come.
Luke had gone to prayers and she was alone in the nearly dark room when Isabelle and Pol came in. The girl looked at the drawings, tracing the boats and the waves with a dirty finger. She didn’t say anything but she nodded, once, deliberately. She’d noticed the nets.
‘How do you do that?’ she asked.
Linnet gave up another scrap and an old pen, and let her do some scribbles. She helped her to make her mark, easy to draw an ‘I’ but the other letters were harder. Pol watched quietly for a while then hopped down to the floor and threw the rushes around.
‘Does he often hide mice?’ Linnet asked, thinking of his hiding place.
‘Yes, he can keep them, and they get with maggots then, so he can eat more.’ Linnet shuddered.
So now she had a maggoty mouse hidden under the floor of her Scriptorium.
Well it was the Prior’s Scriptorium by rights.
It just felt hers and some part of her wanted it to be hers.
Maybe it would be Luke’s. The thought prickled her like straw in her bed.
‘Does he bring you things too?’ she asked. ‘Like paper scraps?’
The girl nodded, preoccupied with getting a ‘B’ down perfectly. ‘He likes what the Prior thinks he’s got hidden,’ she said, then looked up, afraid she’d given something away.
Linnet pretended she hadn’t heard and continued arranging her things. So the Prior was hiding things? Another scrap of a secret to add to her pile of scraps.
It was too dark to see properly so she pushed the child and bird out, and they went for food. Luke saw Isabelle coming out of the Scriptorium and scowled.
‘That’s no place for that little bastard or that evil bird,’ he said sourly.
Linnet was dismayed but Isabelle paid him no attention, she’d heard it all before.
She supposed Isabelle might well be a bastard.
She’d not heard much about her family apart from that they’d all died of that illness years before.
If she was a bastard, could a monk be her father?
That wasn’t unusual, especially in small places where the monks acted like lords of the manor.
Perhaps that was why she got special favours, staying in the kitchen, the Prior watching over her. Could the Prior be Isabelle’s father?
The thought pricked her then, her own father a monk?
No, he couldn’t have kept that hidden while they travelled around the holy houses, someone would have known him.
She couldn’t imagine he would have become a novice in his later years either.
Either Mees was mistaken or he was hiding as something he was not.
A spy, she thought, feeling the idea settle, and herself a spy’s daughter.
A chill whisper of danger travelled down her spine but part of her welcomed it.
When she went across to the tavern that evening, there was the priest, drinking alone this time. She sat down nearby, waiting for him to start on one of his harangues. It wasn’t long coming.
‘Don’t think I didn’t see ’ee, down by the shore yesterday.’ He was stabbing his finger wildly in the air again but his eyes were fixed on her. ‘Those fishermen don’t do things the Christian way, you know, I’ve told ’ee, your soul is in peril.’
If her soul was in peril, his must be pickled by now, she thought sourly, but she tried smiling at him.
‘Has the island changed much do you think, Sir?’ she asked. It was customary to call priests Sir, but it stuck in her throat all the same, he was no great man this one.
‘Not for those fishermen,’ he grumbled. ‘That’s pagan what they do with their boats. The Priory isn’t what it was mind, that was a thing of beauty before. The lords and ladies used to stop by to see it and pray, not like now.’
‘How long has Prior Richard been here then?’
‘About five years. He came just after that big frost, I remember.’
Five years, not long enough to have been Isabelle’s father.
‘And what of Isabelle’s family? You were telling me they all died around then.’
At the mention of Isabelle, he moved swiftly on to denouncing Isabelle’s mother, a loose girl, a girl with too many ideas, a girl with a fancy for silly names, Isabelle for the love of God. What was wrong with Mary?
Plenty, Linnet thought, plenty was wrong with Mary, but she kept listening.
‘No one knew who the baby’s father was, but she didn’t care, flaunting her belly and then her baby, alus carrying her about like she were a princess, not a dirty little bastard.’ He spat at the last word, just missing the table and Linnet.
She’d been loved then, at least at the beginning, that was something, Linnet supposed. Why did the Prior favour her so much then?
Cyrus had started again on the evils of women and how they poisoned the souls of good Christian men. Linnet moved away. She’d got all the information she could for now.
Nothing was clearer yet, but there were mysteries to uncover on this island, and she felt sure the three deaths were neither accident nor self-harm.
With Oswyn, she just wanted to know who killed him and why.
Maykin’s death felt so sad, but she burned to find out who had killed Tom, destroyed his good name and condemned his soul.
If she could prove he’d been killed, the guilt she was feeling might finally leave her.
The sting of the words she’d last said to him.
She lit another stolen candle stub in the embers of the fire in the kitchen, and carried the flame back to her room. The knot, the gilt letter, the scraps of paper from Oswyn’s bed, the black pebbles. What could it all mean?
She smoothed out all the scraps of paper, laying them one above the other and began to see a pattern.
Loops and curls and little stubby marks.
Almost someone’s rough hand here. What had made her think of this earlier?
Luke’s practice scraps when he’d ripped up the letters halfway through and she’d been angry at the waste.
Half a letter. That was it. These were half of a line of text, torn away from the other half.
She spent a long hour matching up the scraps but although she could sometimes discern what she thought might be an ‘S’ or a ‘U’, there was nothing like full letters there. Maybe she was wrong but it had seemed the answer.
Too late now, she put it all back into Tom’s box and settled for the night.
The cat was back, still sulking about the duck no doubt.
He rumbled a purr and she felt almost at peace for the first time since Tom died.
Yes, she was probably being sought by Guy, and others too.
Luke was going to take over her Scriptorium, and there was nothing she could do.
Still, she felt some peace. She had a quest, a search to rescue Tom’s honour and his name.