The Exiled (44 page)

‘These were left here when the lady who owned them died,’ Agatha hurried on, seeing Anne’s uncertain look. ‘No, really, she was a lovely lady and the Lord took her to him from inside the abbey itself; she just keeled over in front of the rood screen one day while she was praying. The abbot says it was a good death, a holy death, and her family didn’t want the clothes when they came to get the body. I’m sure she’d have wanted them put to a good, Christian use?’

The little speech was breathlessly delivered but the idea was bold, even a little shocking. A postulant dressing in worldly clothes so that she could do business with a Jew?

Anne nodded, impressed. Never underestimate a church mouse. ‘A very clever, and serviceable idea, Sister. I am grateful to you. Very grateful, and so is my mother house.’

The ‘church mouse’ blushed with pleasure. It was rare in her comfortless life to receive a compliment. Smiling quickly, she left pretty Sister Anne to her own devices, hurrying away as she remembered the numberless chores assigned to her by Sister-superior.

Anne’s heart hammered as she stripped off the black postulant’s habit and the trailing white veil, shaking out her hair with relief as the hot, constricting wimple came off her head. Then, trying not to hurry, she slipped the dead pilgrim’s prickly wool dress over her naked body — shivering as she felt the coarse weave against her skin — and strained to lace the back without help, no easy task.

Agatha, ever resourceful, had thought to supply Anne with a long sacking apron as well, to help gather the dress in a little since it was the garment of a much larger woman. The combined voluminous folds were a blessing since the two garments, plus the cloak, would be thick enough to keep Anne warm in the bleak weather — an important consideration as she walked down the long hill from the abbey to the town.

Finally Anne was ready, with the green cloak swaddled closely around her, hair pulled back out of sight inside the hood which now shadowed her face.

The extra material in the dress and apron made Anne look stouter than she would ever be, and the basket that Agatha had lent completed the picture. To the world she would look like any other respectable good-wife intent on this morning’s marketing. Even the lay-brother at the abbey’s great gate was fooled when he was asked to let ‘Agatha’s aunt’ out so she could go down to the town. The man saw nothing amiss in the stout little woman who kept her head modestly bent, so he waved Sister Agatha’s ‘aunt’ through cheerfully enough, being careful, however, not to speak to her directly lest he pollute himself by exchanging words with one of Eve’s sisters.

And so, on a clearing late autumn morning, Anne walked down towards the town of Whitby intent on one thing: changing at least one of her remaining gems into money, money that would buy her a passage to France, and thence, to Brugge.

Keeping her head down as she walked, she exchanged greetings with no one and was careful to draw to one side of the narrow road with the hood of her cloak covering her face as a party of armed, mail-wearing men cantered past towards the abbey buildings, driving their horses at a great pace for such a slippery, rain-mired road.

Anne would not have recognised Henry Hardwell if she saw him, but if she’d looked up, she would have remembered Simon the Reeve, having known his face from the baron’s visit to the convent.

But she kept her eyes on the road and the men ignored her. They were after a young girl posing as a novice. Local housewives were of no interest, no interest at all.

T
he Whitby market was very busy as Anne sauntered between the stalls, seeming to carefully inspect the dried cod, the barrels of salt herring, the flitches of bacon and the woollen cloth on sale against the coming winter.

People in the north took full advantage of anything which resembled a fine day at any time of the year, so even if it was cool, with a biting wind off the sea, all of Whitby had things to sell and things to buy, and they were telling everyone and his wife all about it at the tops of their lungs.

But Anne needed information and was uncertain where to find it. Agatha had told her that Master Cohen was to be found in Silver Lane, but her directions had proved confusing. She’d said that Silver Lane ran off Conduit Street, itself a small alley behind the quarter where animals were butchered, close to the market square.

Anne found the butchers and poulterers easily enough, for even on a cold day the stink was impossible to avoid, but Conduit Street she just could not locate in the maze of little alleys filled with shouting men and herds of terrified beasts.

Time was pressing and she had no choice; she must ask directions.

Anne grimaced in sympathy as she passed a small mob of bullocks calves, backed up and blocking the street in wide-eyed confusion as they smelt blood from the slaughter yards, and stopped by the first shop she came to. It was a poulterers stall and the trestle-board in front of the open shop-front was piled high with plucked bird carcasses of all kinds: chickens, ducks and geese, plus the smaller corpses of lark, linnet, blackbird, plover and many water birds she could not name — waders with long legs somehow pathetic in death.

‘Yes? What can we give you today, mistress? We have wonderful fresh chickens, well fed, see? Fine and yellow from last summer’s corn. Plump, really plump. Or duck? Goose? No need for lard when you cook these birds. Then we have teal, and wood-pigeon, doves by the brace and the sweet flesh of song birds.’

It was hard to stop the girl — the poulterer’s daughter — in her sing-song patter, so Anne smiled, said nothing, and waited for her to stop.

‘Lark, linnet, starling, blackbird. Or there’s black gull, and I can even get you pheasant, if you want something a bit special — legally obtained, of course. We have rights to a certain quantity which we buy from the monks’ game preserves.’

The girl guttered to a halt, perplexed and a bit annoyed. Market day was busy, they did their best trading of the whole week; she didn’t have time for a customer who didn’t know what she wanted.

‘Thank you. It all sounds excellent, but what I really need is direction. I’m trying to find someone.’

‘So, did she buy?’ The poulterer’s daughter shook her head as she watched the woman in the green cloak walk away. ‘No, Father, she didn’t.’

The poulterer frowned and his daughter was immediately defensive. ‘I did my best — she was just a looker and a toucher. Wanted to know the way to Silver Lane. Yes, Mistress Rafe, what can I do you for? I mean, do for you?’ Customer and shop attendant laughed, they knew each other well, and with this good-wife, money certainly would change hands to everyone’s advantage.

But the poulterer watched the woman in the green cloak for a moment as she disappeared up the street outside his shop. Silver Lane? Only one reason to go to Silver Lane — the money-changer, the Jew, lived there. No good ever came from money lenders or changers. Or Jews for that matter. Christ knew that.

Impatient with his idle thoughts, the poulterer turned his attention to reaching down a brace of the birds from the carcass-curtain above his daughter’s head. ‘What about a nice, fat duck, Mistress Rafe? Nothing like a juicy bit of duck at the end of the day, that’s what I always say.’

The noise from the market receded as Anne turned a corner beneath the overhung first floor of a large half-timbered house. There were no signs, nothing to say she’d found Silver Lane, but it was a dark, dead-end street and very narrow: black and white houses crowded tightly together, tops almost touching — that had been part of the poultry-girl’s directions.

And there, at the very end of the short street, was the façade of a house, again black and white, but it looked secretive somehow; that too was how the Jew’s house had been described.

Anne stopped hesitantly. Should she knock on a door and ask someone else if this was the place, just to be sure? But then above the blackened front door of the house at the end of the street, Anne just made out a faded chequer-painted board hanging from an iron bracket on which was a crude depiction of gold and silver coins and, above them, a scale.

She had come to the right place, this was the money-changer’s house.

Nervously she clenched the fingers of her right hand tighter around the two remaining gems. If she was clever and careful, perhaps they could bring her old life back; her son, and Deborah. But not Edward, not the king. She dearly hoped they would meet again, just once — let that be, Sword Mother, of your pity — but her path lay away from his. She knew it now, could not avoid that knowledge. She ached, she ached deeply when she thought of life, years and years to come, without Edward, but she must find the strength she had found before when she’d left England, an exile.

Sacrifice. Perhaps these stones were the last sacrifice? Perhaps she had not yet paid enough and must be left with nothing?

Then an odd thing happened: the jewels shifted within her folded palm — they moved. As if they were alive.

Startled, she opened her hand. The last diamond, with its companion ruby, tumbled out and lay on the street where some stray gleam of light from the sky above caught the clarity in both stones amongst the dirt: one bloody, one clear as water. Anne dropped to her knees, scuffling desperately to retrieve the gems. Then she felt a hand drop to her shoulder.

‘These are very fine, very fine indeed. Let me help you.’

Anne scooped up her treasures with one hand, eyes wide with fear. The man stepped back quickly.

‘Hola! I will not hurt you.’

Anne’s heart was pounding, but then, slowly, she relaxed. No, he would not hurt her. He had kind, dark brown eyes and was respectably dressed in a well-made ankle-length woollen gown of a pleasing dense black. Snowy linen, beautifully goffered, formed a high, fluted collar under his chin and peeped through beneath the front fastenings of his robe. He could have been a well-dressed court functionary except for the curls dangling from his forehead and — and his skull cap. That marked him.

‘Are you Master Cohen?’

‘Yes, mistress, I am he. But we have not met. Will you tell me your name?’

‘I am a customer, perhaps that will suffice?’

The old man smiled, a surprisingly sweet sight. ‘Well then, Mistress Customer, let us go into my house, and let me be what service I can to you.’

Anne dared, for a moment, to hope. Soon she would leave this place and this man was the means, the means to that end.

‘Sister, this is very serious for you and for the abbey. A matter of treason. A burning matter.’

Sister Agatha, terrified of the grim soldier in front of her, looked pleadingly at the abbot and her own immediate supervisor, the Sister-superior, mistress of the women-strangers’ dorter. What should she say?

‘The novice we seek. You spoke to her? Helped her?’

An imperceptible nod from the abbot gave Agatha courage to speak.

‘Yes, sir.’

Henry Hardwell was angry; he had no time to waste on this nonsense. With good fortune, and an annoyingly large expenditure of pennies and even thruppences, he’d tracked the two errant ‘nuns’ to the inn at the Whitby waterfront, the ‘Two Tunns’, only to be told they’d gone as pilgrims to this abbey, but now, again, the girl had fled ahead of him!

This was sweaty work — and much at stake. His father’s lusts were a minor consideration now that the duke expected him to deal with the matter of the supposed spy promptly and efficiently, on behalf of the king his brother. And he would do that, by God, so he would. It was a priceless opportunity to gain influence and advancement at court.

And perhaps, when he found the girl, he could just tear her tongue out? That way, he’d have a ‘spy’ to exhibit to the duke, but she’d not be able to speak. Excellent! An excellent solution. He thrust his face close to the mewling child who was the key to the mystery, hissing his question, ‘Where is she? Answer!’

Poor Agatha was torn. Sir Henry was a grim man with a harsh, red face and he meant no good to Sister Anne, of that she was certain. Nervously, she bowed to avoid his gimlet eye.

‘Delay is dangerous, girl, very dangerous.’

The abbot cleared his throat. He was a compassionate man and he did not enjoy the sight of this little poor scrap being bullied so mercilessly, but he was also a pragmatist and he had the welfare of the abbey to think of. To have harboured a spy, running from the king’s justice, was a serious matter; and this man, unpleasant as he was, had warrants from the Duke of Gloucester himself.

‘Sister Agatha, you must speak. If you have knowledge of where our sister might be, you must tell Sir Henry.’

Poor Sister Agatha. She closed her eyes and quickly asked for guidance. None came. Tremulously, she opened them to find Sir Henry glaring directly into her eyes, so close she could smell his breath. It was a shock, she’d never been this close to a man, any man, before. The words babbled out of her mouth in a terrified stream and forever after, when she smelt garlic on another’s breath, unconscious terror would make her bowels run.

‘The Jew’s house in Silver Lane. She’s gone there to change money so that she can return and make a donation to the abbey.’

‘Moneylenders?
Jews
?!’ Henry Hardwell’s rage, never far from the surface, ignited. He hated them, hated them! They were a scourge on the face of the Earth, and it had nothing to do with religion. His father had mortgaged the manor, Henry’s patrimony, to Jews who’d kept the Hardwell’s in debt for years.

It would give him pleasure indeed to go to the moneylender’s house, and find that girl. Great pleasure!

‘We know where she is, Edward. My man tells me the French spy is definitely in Whitby. He’ll have her back here in the next few days.’

The duke delivered his news defiantly, very pleased. He’d just had the dispatch from Henry Hardwell, delivered by an interesting new innovation: a trained pigeon had flown from Whitby to York, the coded message attached to one leg in a tiny lead canister.

Edward grunted as he watched his little son with fascination, totally absorbed. The boy was sitting on the floor doodling with a stick of charcoal on scraps of vellum.