‘None so far,’ I admitted ruefully. ‘For the present I’m as nonplussed as everyone else seems to be. However, I haven’t yet given up all hope of discovering some simple reason for Master Gildersleeve’s disappearance. And now I must return to your stable to fetch my horse before riding back to Glastonbury.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Thomas said. ‘I want a word with my father. Abel, lad, keep an eye on my flock for me while I’m gone, particularly that old tup. He’s as crafty as Satan.’
‘Master Pennard may not be at the house,’ I remarked as we moved off in that direction. ‘He was going to the west pasture to look for your brother after he left me with Abel.’
But whatever business Anthony Pennard had had with Gilbert, it had been of short duration, for he was seated at the table in the kitchen as we entered, laboriously trying to add a column of figures written on the piece of parchment in front of him.
He looked up in relief. ‘By Our Lady, I’m pleased to see you, Thomas, my boy! You’ve a clearer eye and a quicker brain than your old father. See if you can find the answer to this sum. It’s plaguing me silly! Figures and letters — damn stupid, jiggling things! They never make sense when I look at them, but just go dancing around all over the paper. Well, Master Stonecarver, and was Abel of any use to you?’ I shook my head regretfully and he continued, ‘I can’t say I’m much surprised, for there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason in the way Master Peter vanished. There’s no shaking the boy’s story, and as I said to you a while since, I can’t see why he should lie about Peter Gildersleeve’s disappearance. And he has disappeared, that much is for certain.’
I accepted a cup of ale from Mistress Pennard, who, instructing the two maids to continue with the baking, sat down beside her husband. I took a stool on the opposite side of the table. Thomas, meantime, had removed himself to some other part of the house in order to grapple with the addition which was giving his father so much trouble.
‘The track which crosses your land,’ I said, ‘does it date from Roman times?’
Anthony Pennard shrugged. ‘Who can say? It’s certain that it’s very old and has been a common right of way as long as anyone round here can remember. But the Mendips are covered with such tracks. Some lead somewhere, some don’t. Some lead to the great gorge. Have you ever seen it?’
I shook my head. ‘No. Oddly enough, I’ve never been that way, but they say the old Saxon kings used to have one of their dwellings on the heights above it.’
‘That’s as maybe. I never heard so, at any rate. So, Abel wasn’t of much use to you, eh? You’re none the wiser as to what’s happened to Peter Gildersleeve?’
‘Not one whit,’ I acknowledged. I drained my cup and stood up, refusing the goodwife’s offers of further refreshment. ‘I must be getting along now. My thanks to you both for bearing with me.’
Master Pennard rose and clapped me on the back. ‘I’m sorry there’s not more we can do to help. If only we’d had the foresight to keep Abel’s testimony quiet, then it might have been thought that Peter had ridden off on his own somewhere. We could have returned Dorabella to the Gildersleeves later, when they’d had time to think up a story.’ He sighed. ‘But there you are! We all took fright, Mark Gildersleeve included, and now the damage is done as they say. The gossip is spreading, and I daresay we’ll have the Bishop’s men poking and prying about the place once they get wind of the tale.’
‘You’re probably right,’ I agreed, ‘unless I can discover something first. But at the moment, I’m floundering around in the dark with nothing to go on. Only one thing is certain, and that’s that a man has disappeared in the twinkling of an eye in most mysterious circumstances.’
‘Aye, that’s for sure, Chapman,’ Master Pennard nodded. ‘Sure as Christ came to Priddy!’
* * *
As Barnabas and I plodded sedately back along the raised causeway between Wells and Glastonbury, I pondered on that strange expression: ‘Sure as Christ came to Priddy’. It was one with which I had been familiar all my life, and I knew its origins.
The story, handed down from father to son to grandson for hundreds of generations past, said that during the Roman occupation, when they were mining for lead in the Mendips, merchants had arrived from Palestine to do business, chief amongst whom was Joseph of Arimathea. On one visit Joseph had brought with him a young boy, who was our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. The two had lodged at Priddy, and during his stay the Christ Child used to roam the countryside, coming eventually upon the Tor. He was so struck by the sanctity of the place, that He decided to build a church at its foot in His Mother’s honour: thus it was Christ Himself who miraculously raised the earliest church at Glastonbury.
After the Crucifixion, Joseph had returned to Somerset to carry on the work of the Christian faith. Did we not have the Holy Thorn to prove it? Blossoming every year at the time of Our Lord’s nativity, it had first sprouted from Joseph’s staff where he had planted it in the ground. The stories had not always held the prominent position in the religious life of the abbey that they did today, but John Selwood was among those abbots under whose spiritual guidance the cult of Joseph had grown.
For my own part, credulity struggled with disbelief for dominance in my mind. On the one hand I desperately wanted the stories to be true, to believe that the Christ Child really had walked among the Mendip Hills and the pleasant green Somerset valleys; on the other, I knew that such tales, along with those of King Arthur, brought untold wealth and prestige to the abbey in the shape of a constant stream of pilgrims and the claim to be the oldest Christian foundation in the country, if not the world. Abbots of Glastonbury, following the example set them many centuries earlier by Saint Dunstan — until, that is, the saint became Primate of All England himself — tended to go their own way regardless of Canterbury.
With such thoughts jostling around in my head, the five miles between Wells and Glastonbury passed like one. I barely noticed the mid-afternoon heat or the crowded causeway, and was surprised to find myself descending through Bove Town almost before I knew it. As I passed the church of Saint John, Cicely came running up the street to meet me and catch at the horse’s reins.
‘Oh Roger, I’m so glad you’re back,’ she said in a high-pitched, breathless voice. ‘Come into the house at once!’
‘Let me settle Barnabas first,’ I protested, and proceeded towards the market place. Besides stabling the horse, I needed to retrieve my cudgel which I still had not collected from the livery stable.
I handed over the cob and the necessary payment to one of the grooms and followed Barnabas into his stall, where my stick was still propped against the manger. Emerging again into the courtyard, I was astonished to find Cicely waiting for me just inside the big double gates.
‘You’ve had a wasted journey, I’m afraid,’ I told her gently. ‘I know no more about what has happened to your cousin than before I went to the Pennards’.’
I saw the tears well up in her eyes and start to trickle down her cheeks. I put an arm around her shoulders. ‘Don’t cry. I don’t despair yet of finding Peter.’
‘It’s not just that,’ she said, and I felt her tremble. ‘Oh Roger! Now Mark has disappeared as well!’
Chapter Seven
My grip on her shoulders tightened. ‘What do you mean, “disappeared”?’ I demanded. A foolish question, perhaps, for what could the word mean but one thing? Nevertheless, I was not ready to accept as yet that Mark Gildersleeve might have suffered the fate of his brother. ‘No, no,’ I added, ‘don’t tell me here. Say nothing further until we reach your aunt’s house.’ I held up an admonitory finger. ‘Leave it for the moment.’
Within five minutes we were once again entering the shop in High Street to be met by Dame Joan, who, I was relieved to notice, although plainly worried, was far less agitated than her niece. A glimpse into the workroom from the passage was also reassuring, showing me Rob Under-shaft and John Longbones, the latter now returned from the vats, proceeding unconcernedly with their craft. I mounted with the two women to the solar above, feeling Cicely was making much out of little.