Chapter Twenty-Seven
It was another cold, wet day and Lady Margaret and her attendants were preparing to leave. Guy was making sure her bundles were properly attached to the carts and that her servants had fulfilled their duties.
The Prior came out to bless their journey and to ask them to speak kindly of him to Lord Edmund, which Lady Margaret said she would do.
She looked like a pampered child on the horse, small and wrapped up in her furs, but imperious nevertheless, no trace of her earlier timidity remaining.
Linnet noticed her maid casting side eyes at Guy, perhaps suspicious of how quickly he’d become part of the party.
She’d heard Ann tell one of the kitchen maids how Guy had rescued Lady Margaret from a muddy pathway he said was dangerous.
She guessed he’d seen a rich woman riding and thought to get in with her for his advantage.
She’d seen him do that same thing a few times in the past.
Before they left, Guy came over to Linnet.
‘I’ll not be far away, Mary, don’t you forget that.
’ He held out his hand beneath his cloak and she passed him the letter.
It was a fine piece of work but she’d left a little mark in it so that she would know it was hers, if she needed to point it out in the future.
He could have this but she would never give him back that money.
She had to ask: ‘Did you hurt Luke?’
He looked blank but he wouldn’t admit to anything, she knew.
She watched the small train off the island, following the middle Beale boy as he picked his way across the damp sands, a sudden turn or twist to avoid the deadly muds, and lead them safely, if not quite as cleanly as before.
With a stab of fury and fear, she wished the lot of them to misstep and sink below the grey mud and the dark water rushing in, keeping her safe on this island again.
The island was quieter when they had all left. The Prior was plainly relieved that Lady Margaret had gone, but Linnet caught him looking with some impatience at the Inspector. Still here, still digging into things.
Of course he’d be very unhappy with the inspection if he was falsifying the accounts. She determined to look at Oswyn’s book later to see if there was anything amiss.
The two monks in the Scriptorium had been given an exemption from the day’s prayers, they told her. The Prior wanted them to work on the Gospel, especially now Luke was in the Infirmary.
‘How is he?’ she asked.
‘Still very unwell, or vapide as we might say in Latin.’ Father Thomas smiled at her, pleased to be teaching her. She smiled back and wrote it out carefully in her new Latin manual.
She thought about Luke and how much he’d been hurt. She’d been sure he was dead when she’d first seen him lying there. She shuddered.
‘Shall I add more wood to the fire?’ Father Thomas had seen her shiver and thought she was cold. She liked him, and liked having him in her Scriptorium. Until she was told to leave, it would be her Scriptorium. And now the monks were here, a scriptorium with a fire.
A thought came to her. If the Prior was stealing and she could prove it, could she use the knowledge and make him let her stay? But, of course, that would be stupid and dangerous. Had others tried to do that – Tom, Oswyn or Luke?
In the kitchen that evening, Isabelle came and sat close to her, taking the seat just before Jack could sit there. She wondered if he’d spoken with Guy before he’d left. Jack caught her eye from across the room and winked at her. Yes. He must have done.
The room was as busy as normal but everyone seemed a bit more relaxed now Lady Margaret had left.
Linnet had been to many priories and monasteries, and some were more prepared to have visitors than others.
Here on Lindisfarne they seemed to be accepted grudgingly.
The Priory was happy to take their money but provided little enough for it.
Even without the gentry on their trips around the country, there were plenty of people coming and going. But they were working people, lodged above the stables or in the old monastic cells, happy enough with an old bundle of ticking and a worn-out blanket, and here for a purpose.
The talk around the tables was of Luke, why he’d annoyed a horse and so forth. Isabelle kept looking at her, trying to wink but only making strange faces.
‘What’s the matter, child? You got something in your eye?’ Ann asked, kindly enough for once, clearly watching out for her after her illness and now that the Prior had tasked her with it.
‘It’s the smoke from the fire,’ Isabelle replied quickly, and stopped trying to get Linnet’s attention.
Once they were outside she tugged at her sleeve urgently. ‘I know for sure it weren’t no horse! The marks aren’t right, Linnet – I know the marks from a horse kicking.’
‘Have you gone in to see him?’
‘Yes. I took water in for Brother Godfreyd, and he weren’t there so I took a good look at him.
He’s not speaking, didn’t know I was there.
Not dead yet though. Anyways, he had all these bruises around his head – his eyes and cheek had swelled up – and on his chest, but his hands was just scratched. No horse does scratches.’
Again the child’s attention to detail surprised Linnet. She thought of Oswyn’s scratched hands.
‘So if Oswyn, maybe Maykin, and Tom were killed, and Luke beaten, who’s doing it and why?’ She was asking herself as much as the child.
Isabelle looked back at her as if she were wanting answers herself, but said nothing.
Linnet sent her off to bed and went to the tavern. She wanted a hot spiced ale and to see if anyone was talking. She was immediately grabbed by Sir Cyrus, his breath hot and heavy into her face.
‘Took the child off the island, did you? More trouble than she was worth, I’d think!’ He looked very pleased with himself, and she couldn’t deny there was truth in what he was saying. She wondered if he’d ever been off the island, maybe he was jealous of Isabelle.
‘Were you born here, Father?’
‘Of course I was. Born here, learned by the monks here, and then given the priesthood here, and they’ll bury me here too.’
He was probably seventy or more so burying him wasn’t too far off. The thought made her think again of Tom, wrapped in a sheet like waste from a sick bed and planted in the sea. Her anger came back too, white hot and satisfying, burning away some of her grief.
She looked down quickly before Father Cyrus could see it in her eyes. Why was she wasting time here, amongst these loud people with all the noise and drinking, when she could and should be trying to avenge him?
Her best source of information so far had been Oswyn’s book.
He’d loved his secrets, hoarding them like the fat squirrel he had been.
She needed to see if she could patch together anything else that might give her more inspiration.
How many more scrolls had been in the bag?
Why hadn’t she counted them when she had the chance?
She left abruptly, going back to get a candle from the ones she’d hidden in her room and then creeping quietly into the Scriptorium, empty and cold now that the day’s fire had died down.
She felt her way around in the dark, carefully retrieving the book and the bag of scraps before lighting the candle from the embers.
Tucked away at the end of the Priory quarters, the candlelight wouldn’t alert anyone.
The most important secret would have to be the last one he wrote and which may have led to his death.
She set the candle on her desk and laid it all out.
She turned to the last page. There were the usual notes about his tasks for the day, hiring the masons, what they’d be paid, a warning about their drinking and fighting. He knew why they were coming cheap.
The Inspector’s arrival was also noted, which room he had been given, what they would reserve for his candles, his firewood, his food, and Cassian’s name, with a question mark.
Oswyn couldn’t have known how long they would be here but he’d calculated a per diem sum to account for everything, including paper and ink.
Her time helping the Inspector, she noted wryly, was put down as ‘gratis’ with a note that her current pay would suffice for any extra scribing.
And at the foot of the page, the little scribbles and the ripped-off strip.
When she looked back through the rest of the book, she discovered Oswyn had only done this occasionally, not every day.
So the important or dangerous secrets he didn’t want anyone to see, especially perhaps the Prior, he wrote in his smallest hand, in Latin, and then ripped off to keep even more secret.
It was something for him to hoard and lie on in his good blankets in his clean, bare cell. The lives of others.
She got out the little bag of scraps and started trying to match them to the last entry.
Nothing fitted. She found a few others that fitted earlier pages, about Ann the cook, she thought, and about fornicatum, and about one of the monks whose family wasn’t quite what he’d pretended – illegitimus or something like that. But she couldn’t find what she needed.
Finally she counted. She had eleven ripped pages and eight scraps of paper. Where were the rest?
As she put it all away and went to blow out her candle, she saw the rough patch on the floor where Pol had his store.
She carefully moved the rushes, looking for – well did he take paper?
Still nothing but what remained of the vole, and now a shiny button, one she recognised as coming from Lady Margaret’s elegant cloak.