‘He can’t have got far,’ the goldsmith said. ‘I’m going out after him. See if I can track him down.’
I laid a restraining hand on his arm. ‘Don’t be a fool, man!’ For the moment, I had forgotten the difference in our stations. ‘Listen to that rain! You’ll be soaked to the skin in less than a minute. It’s worse than it was quarter of an hour ago. You’ve only to look at Brother Mark, here. He’s like a drowned rat.’
The boy nodded, shivering miserably, and the abbot added his voice to mine.
‘I beg you not to think of it, my son. We’re not even sure the abbey’s been robbed of anything yet. It’s all speculation. It’s certainly not something worth the risk of catching your death of cold.’
But Gilbert Foliot was not in the mood to listen to either of us. He shook off my hand and plunged out into the darkness.
It was at least half an hour before he returned, wet, furious and more than a little dishevelled. His hair was plastered flat to his head and his hands were covered in scratches where he had searched the scrubland on the slopes above the abbey. He was also limping, having, he said, badly twisted his ankle. There was a rent about three inches long in his fur-trimmed tunic.
The abbot and I had by this time rejoined the others in the dining parlour of the former’s lodgings and given them a graphic account of the happenings so far.
‘We thought there was a lot of noise,’ Henry Callowhill remarked comfortably.
‘We did look out,’ Geoffrey Heathersett added, ‘but it was too dark and too wet to see anything clearly.’
They both roundly condemned the goldsmith’s folly in continuing the pursuit and gave it as their considered opinion that he would be laid up tomorrow and unable to resume his journey. In the event, none of us could do so, the storm of the previous evening having worsened and there being rumours, brought by one of the lay brothers, of there being rebel forces in the surrounding hills. It was therefore reluctantly agreed by all of us that, for another twenty-four hours at least, we must stay where we were.
In the presence of the abbot and the infirmarian, I made a close search of the infirmary, particularly the bay occupied by the stranger, but to no avail. He had left no trace of himself. The porter confirmed that he had arrived on foot so there was no horse left behind in the stables which might have yielded up a clue to his identity.
‘A mystery,’ the abbot said with dissatisfaction, but concluded in a resigned tone, ‘and a mystery I’m afraid it will have to remain. If he got what he came for — and if our friend the chapman is correct in what he thinks he saw, he probably did so — then he won’t be visiting us again.’
And that was his last word on the subject, the daily running of a great abbey making too many demands on his time for him to waste any on a problem he was unable and unlikely to solve. But that didn’t prevent the rest of us discussing the subject ad nauseum and propagating the wildest theories as to what the unknown might have found and how he knew of its existence in the first place. Only Gilbert Foliot seemed a little reluctant to take part, but that was because he was very tired and somewhat feverish. His stupidity of the evening before was taking its inevitable toll and he was eventually forced to admit that was feeling unwell. At his friends’ insistence, he finally agreed to pay a visit to Brother Infirmarian and swallow one of his potions.
By dinnertime, the rest of us, cooped up together in the infirmary, unable to ease our cramped limbs with exercise and finding nothing new to say concerning the subject uppermost in all our minds, were beginning to get on one another’s nerves. Oliver Tockney’s north country speech, which I had at first found so fascinating, was now starting to irritate me beyond measure. And I could tell that my flat West Country vowels and Saxon diphthongs were annoying him equally. So, after dinner, between the services of Nones and Vespers, I took myself off to the abbey library and introduced myself to Brother Librarian. ‘Father Abbot told me that if I asked, you would be pleased to show me what was originally found in the secret hiding place,’ I said, investing a somewhat loose remark of the abbot’s with an authority it did not really warrant. ‘And I should very much like to see the diary, if nothing else.’
Brother Librarian was a sour-faced little man who, like so many others of his calling whom I have encountered from time to time, regarded the books and documents in his charge as his personal property, to be handed over to outsiders only with the greatest reluctance.
He began by claiming that he didn’t know where the papers were: no one had asked to look at them for as long as he could remember and he had no idea where they were filed. I stared him down and repeated, mendaciously, that the lord abbot had promised me a sight of them, managing to convey that his superior would be extremely displeased if my desire were thwarted. So finally, after much grumbling under his breath and a token search, Brother Librarian produced the necessary papers with comparative ease from one of the lower shelves. They were enclosed in a cover bound with purple silk which he dropped on to one of the reading stalls, standing in a line along one wall.
‘There you are, then,’ he snapped ungraciously. ‘Just be careful how you handle them, that’s all I can say. They’re over a century and a half old, and fragile.’ He advanced his tight, weasel-like little face to within an inch of mine. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Richard de Bury?’ he sneered.
Not for the first time in my life, I blessed the teaching and knowledge of Brother Hilarion, our Novice Master at Glastonbury, and the endless trouble he had taken to hammer that knowledge into our unreceptive heads. ‘Bishop of Durham, sometime Chancellor and close friend of King Edward III in the last century,’ I answered with a smirk.
‘Oh.’ For a moment my interlocutor was nonplussed, but he soon made a recovery. ‘He was also,’ he went on, ‘one of the greatest bibliophiles this country has ever known, and he wrote a treatise on the disgusting way in which people handle books. Ever read it?’
‘No,’ I said foolishly — but consoled myself with the reflection that even had I answered, ‘Yes,’ he would still have told me what it said. He was one of those who, once he was riding his hobby-horse, there was no way of stopping.
‘Richard de Bury complains’ — and the little man spoke as one who had learned the passage by heart — ‘about the abuser of books who underlines favourite passages with his dirty nails, who marks his place with straws because his memory is poor, who stains the parchment with fruit and wine, who drops into the open pages crumbs of bread and cheese and other such victuals, who falls asleep over his book and in so doing creases the leaves, who turns back the corners of pages and presses wild flowers between them with his sweaty hands, who marks the vellum with soiled gloves and who, finally, flings aside the sacred object so that its leaves are splayed and will no more shut.’ Brother Librarian finished, breathless, on a triumphant shout, an admonitory finger waggling beneath my nose. ‘I trust,’ he added, a gleam of hatred for the despised reader in his eye, ‘that you are not one of those!’
‘No, no!’ I assured him hastily and sat down in the reading stall, spreading out the pages of the account books and diary in front of me.
At last he seemed to take the hint that I wished to be left alone and, still muttering under his breath, moved away to busy himself elsewhere.
The pages I had before me were written on neither vellum nor parchment, but on a cheap paper made of rags. Those belonging to the two account books were the most numerous and, as Father Abbot had warned me, of very little interest except, perhaps, to the abbey’s present manciple as an indication of what was being ordered a hundred and fifty years ago, and for the date. This latter was repeated twice, in Roman numerals, as 1326, which suggested that the pages of the diary were possibly written about the same time. Not necessarily, I reminded myself, but probably.