Stephen bowed his head and left the room. He returned a while later with a long wooden case and laid it on the table in front of Prior Alan. Alan opened it carefully and slid out a roll of vellum and unrolled the first few inches.
‘This is over two hundred years old and see, the writing is as bold and clear as the day it was scratched upon this scroll. The author used the finest quality ink and vellum. Perhaps he was once a sacrist himself, like me, and knew how to buy the best. A pity, such a pity that what was written in faith should be used for such foul ends, yet that is ever the way of man. But we must put a stop to this and let it be known in the town that The Play of Adam is gone and will never again be performed.’
‘You surely don’t mean to burn it,’ Will said. Although he, unlike Prior Alan, was convinced the scene of “Cain and Abel” was cursed, still he could not bear to think of anything so old and beautiful being wholly consigned to the flames.
‘No, I would not destroy it, but like the sword it must be placed where it cannot be used for evil.’
Alan turned over the scroll and dipped his quill in his ink pot. He carefully wrote a few lines on the back of the vellum at the top, then he rolled it up again. Melting the end of the stick of wax in the candle flame, he allowed a glob of it to fall precisely on the edge of the scroll, before swiftly pressing his seal to it. The wax hardened almost as once, sealing the scroll shut.
‘Brother Stephen, choose two of our younger brethren. Tell them they must be ready to leave Ely at dawn. They must take this scroll straight to the Benedictine House at Westminster, and give it into the hand of the abbot. He’s an old friend of mine. He will understand my warning. And it might be wise to instruct the brothers to disguise themselves as lay folk just until they are well beyond Ely. As soon as the news of the pestilence breaks, there will be a great throng scrabbling to leave the town and I don’t want the monks to be at the mercy of their wrath. Tell the brothers not to return until they know Ely is free from the contagion. If God wills it, this Play of Adam might for once save two young lives instead of taking them.’
He handed the scroll to Stephen, who looked down at the words his superior had written.
In that this scroll contains Holy Writ, you shall not suffer it to be destroyed. Yet neither shall you break the seal upon it, lest fools and knaves make of it swords to slay the innocent and infect man’s reason with the worm of madness.
Alan of Walsingham, Prior of Ely.
Outside in the darkness a single bell began to toll. Brother Oswin was dead. How many more times would that bell ring over the coming weeks? Whatever Prior Alan chose to believe, Stephen felt a shadow hovering over Ely, darker and more terrifying than any demon. And he knew then with a dreadful certainty that the scroll had been sealed too late – far too late to save them now.
Historical Notes
In the seventh century St Eltheldreda, daughter of Anna, King of East Anglia, founded the monastery of Ely and her youngest sister, Withburga, founded a nunnery at Dereham. Many miracles were attributed to Withburga, including that a wild doe came to her to be milked twice a day to provide food for the workmen who were building the church at Dereham. When she died in around AD 743, she was buried at Dereham, which became a place of pilgrimage.
In 974, Brithnoth, Abbot of Ely, decided that Withburga should be interred in the cathedral along with her sister Etheldreda. The abbot and his monks broke into the shrine at Dereham and stole the saint’s body. In the morning the men of Dereham gave chase, but the body was already on a boat sailing up the river towards Ely. When the Dereham men returned home they found a miraculous spring had welled up in the empty grave. The shrines of the two princesses, together with the shrines of their sister Sexburga and her daughter, Ermengild, made Ely Cathedral an important medieval pilgrimage site, but, sadly, the shrines were destroyed in 1541 during the Reformation.
Relics of saints were widely used to heal the sick, and also in rituals to raise spirits, angels and demons. The sword described in the story was used by priests who had been trained in the art of necromancy and in summoning spirits. Priests would undertake these rituals in the service of the Church, just as others would perform exorcisms. Today such rites would be condemned by most bishops, but in the Middle Ages they were regarded as part of Christian belief and practice, and a number of learned medieval scholars and theologians wrote detailed treatises on these rituals.
The widely held superstition that a dead man’s hand, or ‘hand of glory’, could be used to open any lock, render a thief invisible and put the occupants of the house to be burgled into a deep sleep was still believed as late as the nineteenth century. Indeed, the Observer newspaper of 1831 reports the arrest of a burglar caught using a hand of glory. These hands were normally cut from the corpse of a hanged man, but since they were also believed to have great curative powers, Father Edmund, in his crazed mind, might well have believed he could use the saint’s hand for this purpose, if she failed to cure the plague.
The return of the plague in 1361 affected Cambridgeshire particularly badly, striking many villages and towns that had escaped the first wave in 1348, with devastating results. Although young men and women were the major casualties of the 1361 outbreak, it did claim the lives of many others, especially those already weakened by the famine.
Act Three
I
The events that led to the death of Christopher Dole, playwright and player, began one autumn evening when he put down his pen with a sigh. He rubbed his eyes and, by the light of the guttering candle, looked again at the last word he had written. Finis. The End. The conclusion of two days and nights of frantic scribbling. He had scarcely stopped to eat or drink. He had taken no more than a mouthful of bread and cheese or a gulp of small beer. If there were moments when he slept, he did not remember them.
Christopher shuffled the loose, folio-sized pages into order on his desk-top. He noted, almost with indifference, the way his handwriting grew worse as side after side of the ruled sheets was filled. The first few pages were neat enough but after that came the blotches, the crossings-out and inserted words. ‘Foul papers’ was the name for this, the first draft of a play. Well, these were very foul papers indeed.
Usually, the draft would be passed to a professional scrivener to make a fair copy. Then it would be transcribed once more into separate rolls containing the parts for the various players. But this play by Christopher Dole would never be seen and heard by an audience. A pity, thought Christopher, blinking and looking through the casement window, which was so small that, if he wished to read or write, he required a candle even on midsummer’s day. Yes, it was a pity this play he’d just completed would never be staged. There were some good things in it. Good things beginning with the title, which was The English Brothers. It contained a scattering of neat verses. A few good jokes. But there were also some dangerous items in The English Brothers. Items meant to bring down trouble on the head of the playwright. Not Christopher Dole but Mr William Shakespeare.
As Christopher thought of Shakespeare, his hands clenched and he felt the familiar knot in his stomach. The rest of the world considered the man from Stratford to be one of nature’s gentlemen, a generous and mild-mannered individual. But Christopher had particular reasons to hate the more successful playwright. One of them was to do with Shakespeare’s opportunism. Years before, Christopher had devised a play based on an old poem entitled The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet. Perhaps he was unwise enough to speak about his intentions, and word got back to WS. Or perhaps the Stratford man stumbled, by coincidence, across the same source. Certainly he worked much more quickly than Christopher. And, as Dole was bound to acknowledge when he finally saw Shakespeare’s love tragedy, WS had done a better job than he, Christopher, would have been capable of. A much better job.