The Alchemist of Netley Abbey: Eighth in the Hildegard of Meaux medieval mystery series Read online

  The Alchemist

  of

  Netley Abbey

  A HILDEGARD OF MEAUX

  MEDIEVAL MYSTERY – BOOK 8

  Cassandra Clark

  WYKEHAM EDITIONS

  Published by Wykeham Editions

  Copyright © 2017 Cassandra Clark

  All rights reserved

  Cassandra Clark has asserted her right

  under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

  Act 1988 to be identified as the author

  of this work

  Author’s website

  www.cassandraclark.co.uk

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  @nunsleuth

  ISBN 978-1-84396-467-4

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  Also in the

  Hildegard of Meaux series

  Hangman Blind

  The Velvet Turnshoe

  The Law of Angels

  The Parliament of Spies

  The Dragon of Handale

  The Butcher of Avignon

  The Scandal of the Skulls

  and to come...

  Murder at Meaux

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright & Credits

  Also in the

  Hildegard of Meuax Sries

  Part I

  Hampshire, July 1388

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part II

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Author’s Note

  Part I

  Hampshire, July 1388

  The friar’s pale, rebellious features were reflected in the polished lens he held between his fingers. The little inverted image mirrored a brow puckered with concentration, a clean-shaven, angular jaw, a shock of wild, black hair, and a sceptical mouth. His eyes had their own luminous depths.

  Now they were focused on the random objects on his work-bench as he inched the lens over them. A startling world was revealed. He held up his hand to the lens. His fingertips were not smooth as he had always supposed. They were fissured with as many crevasses as the mountains of Snowdonia.

  He glanced across to check the alembic where the elixir was still dripping from the spout into the dish below. All was well.

  Outside in Cloister Garth the bell for Vespers began to toll. He ignored it.

  Two ideas filled his mind, first, to find a liquid - like the one dripping through the alembic on the work bench beside him - that would restore life to the dead. And, second, to get hold of the Philosopher’s Stone so he could turn base metals into gold.

  The ignorant whispered about him behind his back, he knew that. ‘Friar Hywel, the Welsh magician,’ they muttered. They were fools, of course. There were no magicians, only charlatans. He was an apothecary and a seeker into the true nature of material things. Plants and herbs, animals, humans, celestial beings, the sun and moon, all shared in the secret of life.

  The books pouring in from Outremer were said to describe the methods for achieving both his aims. Even Owain humorously referred to him as his royal alchemist, in the belief that, when the Stone eventually arrived from Outremer, it could be taken into Wales and the work would begin.

  The wheezing of his apprentice warned of his approach and the door opened to reveal an undernourished youth of sixteen or so.

  The friar gave a long, assessing stare at the skinny figure in the threadbare tunic, the blue eyes, the flaxen curls reaching to his shoulders…Jankin was a Saxon lad to his bones. He had no kinsfolk after the Plague took his entire family in little more than five days...and in Hywel’s view he had nothing to offer apart from tidiness and an eagerness to please…he was one whom, it must be said, no-one would ever miss.

  ‘You needn’t come in, Jankin.’ He cleared his throat to stem the tremor in his voice. ‘I have an errand for you. I need a mouse.’ He paused. ‘A live one.’ When the lad made no move he snapped, ‘Go fetch one then! Jump to it!’

  ‘It’s as good as done, magister.’ Glowing with purpose Jankin went out.

  For some time Hywel could hear only the sound of his own breath whispering on the air while the elixir trickled through its glass labyrinth into the dish. As he waited impatiently for some change he went over what he would do if it worked.

  He would repeat the experiment. If it proved itself once again he would submerge the dead body of the mouse in the elixir. He would know whether the books brought in from the east contained truth or lies because, if true, the mouse would live again.

  His thoughts flew on.

  Next he would find something bigger, a dog or a cat maybe. And, after that - he drew in his breath at his own daring - he would have to find some person, a no good losel from off the streets like Jankin - and kill him. He pictured the bath into which he would plunge the corpse and how it would twitch slowly, so slowly, back into life…first a spasm of the fingers, an eyelid’s flicker, or legs threshing for purchase on the sides of the bath…and then?

  If he had total domination over life and death would he become God? He felt light-headed. I go too far into heresy, he chided.

  A movement brought him back to the present. Time must have flown because when he jerked a glance across his workshop he saw Jankin already framed in the doorway.

  One arm was held stiffly out in front of him. From between his fingers something was dangling and dancing on a thread.

  ‘Your little mouse, magister. Am I to feed him?’

  Hywel shook his head.

  ‘What shall I do with him?’

  ‘Kill it, of course. Then bring its body to me.’

  Chapter One

  It was with a feeling of relief that they eventually left Salisbury behind with its petty civic rivalries and small town concerns. The recent parliament in London, already named by many the Merciless Parliament because of the barbaric manner in which the members of King Richard’s inner council had been executed with little heed to the law, had impinged on their own activities in the town – but for most people the fate of the king was as irrelevant as if it was taking place on the moon.

  ‘Now for the north!’ called Abbot de Courcy as his big, black stallion champed at the bit and Hildegard and the two monks militant, Gregory and Egbert, followed him out of the stable yard.

  ‘I’ll be glad to see home again!’ Hildegard shouted, sitting easily astride her grey mare as it cantered beside the stallion. ‘How everything must have changed at Meaux in our absence!’

  ‘Not too many changes, I hope!’ Hubert called back as the wind tore at their faces and swept Hildegard’s hair from beneath her coif allowing it to stream in gleaming tendrils behind her. The abbot’s reckless mouth curved in a smile of pure happiness as he exchanged a glance with her. ‘Miles to ride y
et, my dearest Hildegard. What joy it is on a fine, bright, summer’s day like today to be riding home with you beside me!’ He reached across to link hands. ‘And when at least we reach our destination you have promised to give me your answer and change our lives forever.’

  It was mid-afternoon when they made their first halt. It was at a farmstead belonging to some of Gregory’s kinsmen on the edge of the Royal Forest. They were to spend the night there to allow him to bid them farewell before traveling north.

  As they sat round the fire pit later, eating nourishing country fare and with mugs of ale in their hands, Gregory smiled round at everyone. ‘I thank you, my lord abbot, our dear Hildegard, and you, Brother Egbert, you old reprobate, for agreeing to make a little detour to see my dear kinsfolk. And you,’ he lifted his mug to include a couple of aunts and uncles and several pretty female cousins, all as tall and notable as himself, ‘I bless you for receiving us with such open hospitality. Who knows when I’ll be in the south again? Blessings on you! I wish you well!’ He stretched his long legs before the fire, his clever, mobile face expressing contentment at this companionable start to the long journey that lay ahead.

  ‘We’re glad of the detour,’ Brother Egbert observed. ‘A full day in the saddle after our soft living in Salisbury would have us groaning with aching backsides. Happily this is a gentle start to a long though pleasant journey.’

  Egbert, a tough, four-square Cistercian monk looked every inch the sword-carrying militant he was, unlike Gregory who seemed all willow and vapour until he had a sword in his hand, and then there was no-one to beat him. Egbert gave one of the kinswomen a soft look. ‘I confess, I shall be sorry to drag myself away from the temptations of the secular world,’ he murmured with an appreciative smile.

  And so it was the four Cistercians, cheered though somewhat stiff in the limbs set off next morning at dawn on a mazy pathway through the forest that led them, they were confidently informed, towards the London road no more than twenty miles distant.

  Once the sun rose it turned out to be one of those hazy July days when mist settles low in the valleys and drifts between the trees, to spread a veil over the woods that, no matter how long the journey, beguiles with softness and secrets. The track was so well hidden by shifting mists that more than once Egbert was heard to affirm that the sun would soon burn it off.

  They rode on in a dream-like silence, down into misty valleys and up between rows of sentinel-straight trees to the summits of small rounded hills and every time they ascended someone thought to say, ‘Now we’ll see the track laid out plain before us,’ and every time their prophecy failed.

  It was already late by the time Gregory began to hint that his stomach told him to stop and eat and the words were barely out before Egbert drew his horse into a small clearing and slid down into the untrodden grass with a sigh of relief.

  ‘It strikes me folk round here have no taste for travelling,’ he observed as he pulled down his saddle bag and unstrapped it to reveal the gift of food inside, made up in similar wise for each of them by Gregory’s kin. ‘See how the track’s overgrown with moss? And the grass is barely trodden except by deer or some such. Stay-at-home folk round here, are they, Gregory?’

  ‘My kin certainly are. They have enough to do on their farms, they say, without going far from home with no good reason. I’m a source of wonder to them and they can scarcely believe I’ve spent seven years in the Holy Land. Go on, they say, tell us more. You saw how they kept us up late last night, demanding to know every last trifle of our exploits there.’ He yawned.‘I wish they’d curbed their curiosity somewhat – I could sleep the rest of the day through.’

  Taking his own pack from the saddlebag he began to eat but something seemed to be bothering him other than tiredness and he kept looking round and staring up at the sky until Hildegard was forced to ask between mouthfuls of bread and cheese, ‘What is it, Gregory?’

  ‘We’ve been making good time along this track and would surely now be close to the road they mentioned and yet I can see no sign of it. The ground is virtually untrodden. Doesn’t it strike you as strange?’

  Their abbot agreed. ‘I’ve been thinking the same but put my trust in their better knowledge. Now you say they rarely travel any distance from their demesne I wonder how surely they know the way. Didn’t you tell us none of them had even travelled as far as Southampton, let alone London?’

  ‘I admit I’m tending to lose faith in them too, Hubert. With no sun it’s difficult to gauge our direction. What do you others think?’

  Hildegard reluctantly admitted she felt they had traveled too far south. ‘Look at the sky behind those trees.’She gestured towards a dip in the ground where the track wound out of sight between boles of ancient beech and the tree tops, in full and glorious summer green, parted a little to reveal levels of blue stretching to the horizon. An unbroken vista of trees with no sign of farm or homestead to break the view lay beneath. ‘Is it not much lighter in that direction?’ She pointed. ‘To me it shows we’re riding south.’

  ‘It is lighter, granted, but maybe it’s a mere thinning in the clouds?’ suggested Egbert with his usual optimism.

  Hubert asserted his authority as abbot. ‘I share some unease. Let’s go on as far as the next turning and take stock again. Everyone agreed?’

  ‘Agreed.’ Gregory drained his flask, reinserted the cork, stowed it in his saddle bag and was first to sit astride his horse again. Without waiting for the others he dug his heels into his steed’s flanks and set off at a gallop with the two monks streaming after him in a race to be first.

  Hildegard followed at a more leisurely pace. They had been lured off the main track by the promise of a short cut their hosts had mentioned but they had clearly not found it. The journey was so pleasant despite the deceptions of summer mist that nobody wanted to suggest turning back. They had ridden on somewhat blindly down the narrow lanes that ran like the veins on the back of a hand, revelling in the dream-like silence of the woods, enjoying sudden glimpses of tree-covered hills floating magically above the mist, trusting, too readily as it now seemed, to providence when they should have paid more attention to the windings and wendings of the way.

  The woodland was broken up now and then by the brilliant green levels of the deer lawns, and by ponds and rills, with sudden herds of deer, heads lifted, still as trees as the riders passed harmlessly by.

  Hildegard’s own idling thoughts, accompanied by the lulling of constant bird song, dwelt on Meaux, on its open skies, its bell-tower, its great grey stone-carved gatehouse, the distant bleating of sheep, the random sounds of the lay-brothers going about their business in byre and barn, and the singing of the monks and her own nuns in their grange across the abbot’s canal. Her longing to be home again erased all other thoughts.

  The decision Hubert expected her to make about their future scarcely troubled her in this present idyll. Time for that when they reached their destination. For now it was enough to ride by his side, to wake each morning in the certainty of seeing him going about his duties, to hear his laughter and his provoking nonsense with his brother monks. Snatched moments of felicity in a life of duty and piety should surely not be begrudged them?

  Contentedly she allowed her mount to amble along the track as it would, making no attempt to catch up with the men just yet. In the distance their random shouts came belling between the trees as they raced on until the sound of their voices were folded into the silence of woodland in high summer.

  It is not true silence, she was thinking, the air is full of sounds: bird song, rustling leaves, some sounds near, some far, some familiar and some unidentifiable. It was a surprise then when a slight change from lower down the track sent an unexpected tremor through her even before she identified it.

  Huntsmen, she decided. It would be helpful if they would guide them onto the right track.

  Jolted out of her reverie she heard a shout rend the air, an oath followed and then there was an alarming sound like steel against stee
l and the crashing of a frightened horse rampaging through the undergrowth. It urged her to send her horse galloping down the track and when she burst through the screening undergrowth into the next clearing she was in time to see Hubert’s horse bolting in fright and a figure in white writhing on the ground in evident pain.

  She took in the rest of the scene at a glance. Egbert had dismounted and drawn his sword. Two strangers, both wearing bassinets concealing their faces but not their snarls of derision, were advancing on the monk from two directions. Hubert was unable to help because he was lying on the ground, holding his right leg in both hands and muttering under his breath, while Gregory was dealing with two more attackers as they tried to grapple him off his horse.

  His sword was raised and a flashing smile split his tanned face as she heard him shout, ‘Monastics, think you? Helpless, you say? Come on, then, my friends, let me show you how helpless we are!’

  Before either of them could drag him off his horse he brought down his sword perpendicularly in one smooth movement onto the shoulder of one of his assailants with professional fore-knowledge of what would happen.

  It split the links of the man’s mail neatly apart, leaving a bloody gash that sent his sword flying from his grasp. He went howling into the bushes with one hand to his shoulder. Gregory picked up his sword and turned to the second assailant.

  Egbert, short and stocky and as strong as a bull, was unbothered by his two opponents, making short work of them, unswording one and holding the other to the ground with the tip of his blade pricking at his throat while he plucked his sword from his resistless hand.

  Hildegard’s eyes widened in fear as someone else emerged from the trees where the horses were waiting and advanced on Hubert with his sword raised. Without a thought she kicked her horse forward with the idea of running the man down but Gregory, noticing what was happening shouted, ‘Hildi!’ As she glanced back he threw a sword to her. She grasped it in both hands and bore down on Hubert’s attacker. Before she could beat him back he caught sight of her, leaped bodily at the horse and pulled her to the ground.