touching the flames whilst customers clapped their hands and shouted encouragement. Now she lay, a pathetic bundle of flesh. She still wore her dark-blue smock but her face had lost all its beauty. A greenish pallor tinged her sagging cheeks, head slightly twisted, eyes half-closed, her lips tinged with blood. It was the mark in her throat which repelled Matthias — two large gaps on either side of the windpipe.
‘That’s how she was found,’ the friar explained, kneeling at the other side of the makeshift bed. ‘Those who found her,’ he continued, ‘said she had been pierced like a plum and drained of her blood.’
Matthias flinched and fought to keep his own nightmares under control.
‘Something else,’ the friar got to his feet, ‘there were rose petals all about her, as if she had been playing “He loves me, He loves me not” with the flowers. It would appear,’ he continued cautiously, ‘he loved her not, or perhaps too much.’
Matthias could take no more. He sprang to his feet, threw a penny at the surprised lay brother and fled the death house. He was across the bridge, back in the city, before he recovered his wits.
The sun had disappeared. The sky had turned a leaden grey, the clouds pressing down, threatening rain. The stall-holders were already pulling sheets over their goods. Matthias loosened the clasp on his shirt. Pulling down his jerkin, he allowed the cool breeze to bathe the sweat on his neck. For a while he wandered amongst the stalls, past the clothiers, the baturs, who smoothed the coarse cloth: the cuissiers with their cushions heaped high on the stalls. An apprentice came running out, trying to clasp a spur on Matthias’ boot, but he caught Matthias’ glance and fled back into his shop.
Matthias wanted such commonplace things to soothe the turmoil in his soul but a young man with a falcon on his wrist reminded him of the hermit. A priest leading a funeral cortege recalled Parson Osbert. Matthias was sure that the young woman in front of him with a child holding a pig’s bladder was Christina. And was that not Fulcher the blacksmith sitting at a table staring through a tavern window?
Matthias turned into Ivy Lane, a broad alleyway which led down to one of his favourite ale houses, the Pestle and Mortar. Yet, even here, Matthias felt he was in a nightmare. A makeshift gallows had been erected halfway down: the corpse of a felon swung there, neck awry, face turned a purplish hue. The placard round his neck proclaimed he was a thrice-caught housebreaker. Some drunken students stood around, carolling the corpse with a favourite goliard song ‘Jove cum laude’. They tried to entice Matthias to join in but he shouldered by them. The students, led by a golden-haired, baby-faced young man, screamed obscenities back. Matthias hurried on into the taproom of the Pestle and Mortar. He drank two cups of wine before he felt the panic recede.
Across the tavern a physician, a quack, his vein-streaked face coarsened by alcohol, his silvery-grey hair shrouding his face like that of a woman, was trying to sell his potions to the saggy-faced, bleary-eyed customers. To one old woman, her skin a blotchy, purplish grey, the quack offered a potion to cure toothache: a copper needle steeped in the juice of a woodlouse. To another a piece of Spanish jade, a sure remedy for pains in the side. When he failed to sell these, the quack brought his tray across and offered Matthias a whole range of herbs: nasturtium, sour thistle, wood sorrel, wood sage, liverwort, fennel.
‘And,’ the fellow screeched, thin fingers snaking out, ‘milk of roses: a love potion. .’ He stopped gabbling and stared down at the tip of the dagger only an inch from his nose. The fellow’s mouth cracked into a smile. ‘The young sir does not want to buy?’
‘Piss off!’ Matthias retorted. ‘Take your rubbish and piss off!’
The quack seized his goods and scurried like a squirrel through the doorway. The rest of the customers, who had grown tired of the charlatan, applauded Matthias, but the student resheathed his dagger, already lost in his own thoughts.
The nightmare had returned! He thought he had locked it into the darkness of the past, ever since that morning when he had woken in a chamber in Baron Sanguis’ manor house and those young women, maids of the household, clustered round his bed. He could tell by their eyes that something horrible had happened. Matthias felt inside his pouch and pulled out a piece of parchment. It was not the same one his father had given him that last, dreadful night in the parish church but it was a fair copy. Time and again he had studied the citations Parson Osbert had scrawled on that greasy piece of parchment.
The first Genesis was from Chapter 6, Verse 2: ‘The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.’ And a text from Chapter 14 of the prophet Isaiah. ‘Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us? Thy pomp is brought down to the grave. . How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground.’
The next text was from the Book of Tobit, Chapter 3, Verse 8, about a young woman Sarah: ‘She had been married to seven husbands whom Asmadeus, the evil spirit, had killed before they had lain with her.’ Finally, there was a quotation from the Gospels, which had very little to do with the ones which went before. The words of Christ to his disciples: ‘If anyone loves me, I shall love him and my Father will love him. And my Father and I will come and make our home with him.’
Matthias sighed, rolled the parchment up and slipped it back into his pouch. He had never really understood what his father had meant by these messages. Over the years Matthias’ interest in demonology, the activities of witches and warlocks, had deepened. In his heart he recognised that the events which had occurred at Sutton Courteny during those few months of 1471 could not be explained in human terms. During his years of scholarship, where he could, Matthias had consulted the secret books of writers on demonology. At Oxford he attended the schools, listened to lectures and studied the works of Peter the Lombard, Abelard, Bonaventure, the great commentators on philosophy, theology and scripture. In Duke Humphrey’s library, however, Matthias read the works of authors which, if the University authorities found out, would certainly bring him under suspicion of being a heretic or a warlock. The writings of the alchemist John de Meung, the ‘Opera’ of Arnaud de Villeneuve the occultist. The treatises of Simon bar Yokhai, master of the secret cabal. These scholars, as well as the orthodox ones such as Aquinas, Augustine, Origen and Tertullian, provided a bleak perception of man’s reality: a constant battle between good and evil; of Satan and other demon lords waging eternal war against man and all God’s creation.
Matthias had remained both cynical and confused by what he read: most of it was the work of fertile imaginations. Even at Oxford, students were only too keen to become involved in secret rites, a pretext for dancing naked in some wood under the stars and fornicating freely with whores. Moreover, these writings did little to explain the events at Sutton Courteny. Why did they happen? What was so important about a sleepy little hamlet in Gloucestershire that could provoke such terrible events and lead to so many hideous deaths? Stories and legends abounded yet Matthias had found no one who could really explain such events. Everyone in that church had died, apart from himself. He had been heavily drugged and slept during the entire massacre.
No one had explained why he’d survived. Many believed Parson Osbert had given him a potion and so saved his life. Matthias had always wondered about the friendship shown to him by Rahere and the hermit. Why was he singled out for such tenderness? Were they really responsible for the blood-drained cadavers and, if so, why did they kill in such a barbaric fashion? How was it the hermit and the clerk, complete strangers to each other and so contrasting in their appearance and background, were reflections of the same personality? What had turned the minds of his parents in such a turbulent way? What was their relationship with the hermit? Such questions vexed Matthias’ mind, nagged his soul, yet the passing of time and all his studies had yielded no real answers.
Once Matthias had entered the household of Baron Sanguis nothing else mysterious had happened, except when he had lodged with the monks at Tewkesbury, just after his fourteenth birthday. The brothers had gossiped how, in the gallery outside the boys’ dormitory where Matthias slept, they could smell, even though it was mid- winter, the rich, heavy aroma of roses. Matthias had kept silent, as he always did, during those few weeks in the winter of 1478. He had fallen ill but then the phenomenon had passed and his life had continued. Indeed, only his youth and the humdrum tenor of the years after the sinister events of that All-Hallows Eve had kept him sane. Matthias dare not mention his fears to others and, in time, he half-believed that night was just a horrifying phantasm, something dreamt in a nightmare. He had held on to this; his way of keeping the door to that dark past of his soul firmly locked, until today.
Matthias closed his eyes: why, he wondered, why now?
He opened his eyes and drained his wine cup. He stared through the open doorway. He felt slightly drunk but more comfortable. He would seek out Santerre, his friend and companion. Perhaps there was some rational explanation of what had occurred? Matthias went out to the alleyway. It was darker than he thought, the place now empty, the drunken students long disappeared, only the corpse still hung from its makeshift scaffold, twirling in the brisk evening breeze. Matthias closed his eyes and said a prayer, the same one his father had taught
