Bristol House (10 page)

Dom Justin

From the Waiting Place

When I first went to the Charterhouse, I intended only to pretend to follow the ritual. Four years later doing as Carthusians do had come to seem the natural way of things. Except that I was certain no Carthusian in all the centuries of the Order had done as I did at least once each week and sometimes more often.

Master Cromwell had used his power as privy councillor to the king to arrange that my cell be the one on the corner of the Great Cloister, a short distance from the trades entrance used by laypeople who had business with the monastery. That gate had no purpose private to the monks and was never barred.

On the day of the Venerable Father’s martyrdom, having been earlier sent the signal of the speckled quail’s egg, I waited until the shadows lengthened. Then, keeping close to the walls, I crept out of the Charterhouse using my customary route. Soon I was hurrying across the fields looking sometimes toward the nearby monastery of the soldier monks, the Knights Hospitaller of St. John. That monastery had once belonged to the Knights Templar, as was still obvious by its distinctive round church, but in 1312 the Holy Inquisition said the Templars confessed to heresy, and the pope suppressed them and gave all their property to the St. Johns. What would I confess, I wondered, after the rack and the thumbscrews? Whatever I was told to confess. Worse perhaps than ceremonies involving an obscene kiss and spitting on the cross, but that had been enough to smoke the skies over Europe with burnt Templar flesh. I shuddered, thinking that I too lived under the threat of the stake, and walked on beside the Fleet until I saw the small copse of trees that separated the Jew’s house from the river.

I had just gathered up the skirt of my habit to run toward it when I noticed a white glow hanging above the water. It shimmered and shone in the night, and I put my hand to my mouth to muffle my terror and signed myself with the cross of Christ, but I could not command my legs to move. Perhaps the Venerable Father himself waited to accuse me. He was surely by then in that place where all things are known. How would he repay me for the terrible betrayal I had practiced these four years?

“At last you are here,” a voice said, “I have made every excuse I could think of to come out and look for you. You must hurry.”

Rebecca, the Jew’s daughter and the reason, apart from Thomas Cromwell’s command, that I was a monk of the Charterhouse, emerged from the copse. “Why do you stand there? Come quickly.” She held out her hand and whispered, “We can steal a few seconds if you waste no more time.”

God knows it was not the first time she had found an opportunity to meet me on the darkened path, but surely, I thought, she would not be so brazen as to thrust herself against me in the presence of the glowing spirit. “We dare not,” I whispered. “Do you not see the Venerable Father there behind me?”

“The Venerable Father?” Her voice had that teasing undertone that was so much a part of Rebecca’s character. “Even the silent monks of the Charterhouse must know their prior died today at Tyburn.”

“His body perhaps. His spirit is here. Look!” I turned to point to the white light rising from the river, but it was gone.

“You are mad as well as late. Come at once. Master Cromwell waits inside.”

“The master himself?”

I was astonished, since usually he sent his secretary to take my report, but Rebecca was unlikely to mistake one for the other. The secretary was a man whose face was horribly marked by the pox, and who carried about him a dead rodent stink which announced his presence before any sight of him.

“The master himself,” she repeated. “Hurry. He is impatient for you, and I have left him alone.”

This could portend no good. It was Thomas Cromwell’s habit always to keep himself at many removes from his schemes and strategies. He was far too clever not to know that in Henry’s England he might himself one day need to profess an innocence he truly possessed. I was sure, for instance, that the speckled egg which on occasion appeared in the basket of food delivered at midday to my door and meant I must visit the Jew, was put there by someone who received the instruction from someone else. That someone would have had the order by way of a signal from yet another—and none would know precisely what the egg commanded, or whether indeed I was the last in the chain to act on its authority. All was no doubt put in train by a murmured word from the master to his foul-smelling secretary, but neither would have had any knowledge of quails, their eggs, or indeed what device was chosen to summon me. Master Cromwell had placed me in the Charterhouse, but I did not imagine myself his only spy within its walls. None of this was the business of any woman, even one as clever as Rebecca. I asked only, “Where is your father?”

“Out doing Master Cromwell’s business,” she said.

I knew well the nature of that business. Like everyone, Master Cromwell believed the Templars had brought wondrous things back to England from Jerusalem, then hidden them with such cunning, they were unfound these two hundred years since the old knights’ disgrace. Somehow Master Cromwell had discovered that the man known to all London as Giacomo the Lombard was a Jew. As payment for keeping his secret, Giacomo was ordered to live outside the city wall and search the Holborn countryside for the Templars’ treasure, things he would recognize more readily than most, being a goldsmith of some renown.

“Why do you dally?” Rebecca demanded. “Already he has waited too long.” She motioned me forward, but she herself did not move. To avoid the thorns of the barberry bushes either side, I must pass so close as to touch her body with my own.

Her smell overwhelmed me.

She rose on her toes to reach my height and for a moment pushed her breasts against me. “Do not forget me,” she whispered into my ear.

Would to God that I could have done so, and thus perhaps secured forgiveness of my many sins.

I pushed past her without speaking, grateful for the loose white robe that hid the sign of how strongly Adam responded to Eve’s sinful provocation, and went into the modest little house.

Master Cromwell demanded to know everything that was said when the word of the Venerable Father’s death reached the monastery. I must tell him, he said, who wept and who cursed, and if any of the monks seemed to think justice had not been done.

I dared not tell him that none thought justice done. It was Thomas Cromwell’s intention to have the property of the Charterhouse in his possession once he made all England Protestant. He had told me so himself back in the days when I was his bound servant, but I had proof of neither the man’s heresy nor his greed. If I took such information to the king, he would believe Cromwell’s word over mine, and my end would be the same, burning or quartering. So I told the man whom I still thought of as my master—as indeed he was, if a master is one who has power over another—as much of the truth as I could manage without piling still more sin on my soul. “Even Dom Hilary spoke only of the glory of heaven,” I said, “not the means of the Venerable Father’s getting there.”

Cromwell smiled at that. “Ah yes,” he said. “Dom Hilary. He is known to be the holiest monk in the Charterhouse, is he not?”

“So it is said, master. And not just by the monks. Many people from the town come to the monastery gates to beg for Dom Hilary’s prayers. Before becoming a Carthusian, he was an ordinary priest in London, a bishop in fact, so many knew him.”

“Priests and bishops,” Cromwell said with one of those smiles that in any other man might appear to be a grimace. “We shall see how long they are important in this kingdom.” Then he dropped any pretense of good humor and grabbed the front of my habit and put his face close to mine and asked, “Did this Dom Hilary who is also a bishop not call down a curse on the king for ordering a traitor’s death for your prior?”

“Absolutely not.” My master looked hard at me, but I did not change my story.

“And since these Carthusians have made you a priest after their detestable custom”—he whispered the words though there were none to hear him, Rebecca having remained outside and left us to our business—“we know you cannot lie. Is that not so, Dom Justin?”

He spoke the name assigned to me in religion in the same manner as he said everything else, with contempt. But I answered as if his question held no guile. “That is true, master.”

After a time he released his grip and looked away, so dismissing the subject of my ordination. Easy for him, but not for me.

When Master Cromwell first sent me to the Charterhouse, I believed he would release me from my charge before the time of my priesting should arrive. Even after I had been some three years among them, he still had not. Then, six months before, the holy Dom Hilary had himself laid his hands on my head and anointed me with holy oil and proclaimed me priest. So priest I truly was. As well as a Carthusian monk, vowed never to depart the monastery and to be always poor and chaste and obedient.

Almighty God, I thank you for the great mercy you have shown in assigning me to this place in Purgatory where I might atone for my many sins.

But I must go on, for as yet I have not told the worst of them, and I sense that on the other side time grows short and the woman’s danger increases . . .

When I left the Jew’s house, Rebecca was again waiting in the stand of trees beside the river. But this time when she pressed against me, the hair shirt of the Carthusian rule, a garment we wear always beneath our habits, scraped against my skin, and I was reminded of the suffering of eternal damnation. It was enough to overcome the carnal heat that burned my flesh, though my cock stiffened at the mere thought of the sin to which I had not as yet succumbed.

I returned quickly to the Charterhouse, but despite the urgency to be back in my cell before the bell rang for the midnight office, I was forced to pause when I saw nailed above the great doors the quarter part of the carcass of the Venerable Father. It had been put there since I left, and below it was a notice saying the thing must not be removed, “on pain of an even more terrible death for he who did the action and all who encouraged him therein.”

Giacomo the Lombard, known also as the Jew of Holborn

From the Waiting Place

I do not know why I am commanded to tell my story, nor who it is who listens. But I am grateful to be in this place that is neither earth nor Gehenna, where the eternal fire burns. I have, I know, much for which to atone, and I am promised that to tell what happened between me and my daughter and he who was known in the Charterhouse as Dom Justin will help erase their stain. So be it.

I am not required to tell everything: not how I came to leave Lombardy and smuggle myself into London to seek greater fortune, nor of the sweet young maiden I married there, a Lombard who was secretly a Jew like myself and a number of others, nor of her death hours after she gave birth to our only child, a daughter. What matters to the story I must tell is that when he was still at the beginning of his rise to the great power he was to wield, the man known as Thomas Cromwell learned my secret. Even with such vision as is granted me here, I do not know if it was his lackey, the draftsman Richard Scranton, who somehow exposed me, though I suspected that to be the case. Such details are of no importance now. It is enough to say that Thomas Cromwell commanded me to leave the town and live in the rural fastness of Holborn, there to seek on his behalf the rumored treasures of the disgraced Templars.

From the very moment I was assigned the task, I knew that if it was the will of Boré Olam that I should discover such Jewish treasures, I would never give them into the hands of any gentile. When, after a year in the Holborn countryside, I did indeed stumble on such treasures as had come from ancient Jerusalem, defiance was already rooted in my heart.

In this place where neither past nor present has meaning, it all seems of such little import . . . But I am given to understand I must begin my story at a specific point in earthly time, the night when the monk came to my cottage beside the river Fleet, and contrary to the many previous occasions, I was not there waiting for him.

Great peril had been my constant companion during the Holborn years, but I did not know how much it increased when I chose that particular evening to go to the pit. I could not anticipate that Master Cromwell would on that occasion not send his usual vassal but instead would come himself to meet his treacherous Carthusian. Even if I’d known, I might have done nothing different.

I found the pit irresistible. Since I discovered the place, it had infected my mind and churned in my belly and demanded my speedy return. So that evening I left Rebecca to receive the stinking lackey I expected Cromwell to send, a small, dark man with the mark of the pox on his face and always a stench of dead rat about him. He was an unwelcome guest, but Rebecca and I were accustomed to him. The strange trysts between him and the Carthusian had gone on for nearly four years, since my daughter was eleven and just beginning to show her womanliness and the uncommon beauty that was so much like her mother’s. Rebecca looked unhappy at the prospect of the meeting—I had seen how the poxed man eyed her and so, no doubt, had she—but she saw that I had made up my mind and did not argue.

That same day I had been testing different compounds to make new things appear old—a necessary part of the great deception I practiced on Thomas Cromwell. When the latest such experiment proved unsatisfactory I threw the mixture into the river. The result was first a bright blue flame, then a ghostly white glow that lingered above the water for many hours. I had long been a goldsmith, but I had never seen such a thing before. It entered my mind that perhaps the days the ancient rabbis promised were near, the end times when Boré Olam would send the Chosen One to judge the world and bring peace and justice to all who were worthy and cast the rest into Gehenna.