thought, with the stone tombs for the start of it then, when only the bones are left, they are stuffed in a hole in the wall. Cloistered in death as in life.
‘Is this the very kist, then?’ Sim hissed and Hal saw the only one without a heavy cover.
‘Aye,’ Kirkpatrick grunted, moving to the door at the top of three worn stone steps. It led to the inside of the chapel and Hal hoped it would be an easier opening than the one that had led to this place.
Choked with weeds and disuse, it had to be dug out and each grunt and thump of it panicking them with discovery. They had brought three of the steers with them, to pretend they were gathering them up from grazing among the dead, but it was not much of an excuse. Dog Boy had been left at the entrance, as much for the trinity of kine as a guard for the backs of the ones in the crypt.
‘Ach — it is empty.’
Sim’s voice was still a hissed whisper, but disappointment had robbed him of his fear, so that it was loud and seemed louder still in the echo of the place.
‘Weesht.’
Kirkpatrick’s scowl was matched by a notched eyebrow of Sim’s own.
‘I only thought there might be someone in it,’ he protested. Loudly.
‘I have no care if Christ’s very bones are in it,’ Kirkpatrick spat back. ‘I should have handed ye a horn and had ye announce us.’
‘Open the bliddy door,’ Sim responded in a low mutter and Kirkpatrick drew out his dagger, the four sides of it winking malevolently. Hal and Sim waited, half-crouched as if the niches of the place would erupt shrieking demons, but there was only the smell of stone and old must. Yet the square holes of the place seemed like accusing black eyes on Hal’s back.
The rending creak was a rasp along all their nerves, so that Kirkpatrick stopped at once and everyone froze.
‘No horn needed,’ Sim growled bitterly and Hal silenced him, deciding that matters had gone far enough between him and Kirkpatrick. The latter put away his four-sided dirk and heaved the door open, heedless of the shrieking grate of it.
‘Who is in here anyway?’ he demanded into their wincing. ‘A rickle of old bones, yon wee priest and Jop himself, too huddled in a hole to be a bother.’
Jop was not cowering, for they found him after creeping, mouse-quiet, through the chapel, a place as simple as a barn, no transepts, with a second-storey campanile and beams just visible in the light.
Vine leaves painted an eye-watering green adorned the corbels and capitals of pillars built into the half-stone walls and lurid, flaming scenes from the scriptures jumped out from rough white plaster on every side; Hell burned more fiery in the glimmer of Kirkpatrick’s lantern.
There was a font near the door, no more than a large bowl on a plinth and, apart from an altar on a dais, nothing else but a worn flagged floor. Above the altar was a painting of Saint Christopher bearing the Christ Child, who scowled disapprovingly at the unlit sanctuary lamp.
There was no sign of the priest they had seen earlier — but Jop was up and fiercely challenging when they came through the door to his room, up some stairs of the wooden campanile and one level below the belfry itself.
‘Who’s this — who the De’il are you?’
He was big, Hal admitted, seemingly bigger in the low-ceilinged room, already crowded with a truckle bed, a stout kist and a brazier of red coals. Copper hair, a fierce eye, big shoulders — for a moment they all three thought they had stumbled on The Wallace by accident.
Yet a second glance told the truth of it — the face was the same, but as if someone had stuck bellows in the mouth and puffed it up. The eye was fierce, but the heart behind it was not. The height was the same, but the shoulders were fatty and the belly an ale cask.
‘Jop,’ Kirkpatrick declared and hauled out the four-sided dirk, so that the big man backed away, collided with the truckle and sat so hard Hal heard it splinter.
‘Who sent ye?’ the man hoarsed out and Kirkpatrick chuckled.
‘Nobody in London, if that is what ye think,’ he replied. ‘Though ye will speak of that place afore we are through.’
‘No English neither,’ Hal added. ‘Though Longshanks will be anxious to ask you aboot the cross ye have snugged up somewheres.’
Jop blinked and sagged, which brought a vicious chuckle from Kirkpatrick.
‘Aye, we ken of it. Ye will tell us where we can find it.’
‘It were only half the cross. Yon wee pardoner, Lamprecht, the coo shite, had half of it,’ he offered to Kirkpatrick. ‘We helped shift some loot from the back o’ the minster where it had been hid, for Mabs in Sty Lane, though it was ower treacherous to try at that time, wi’ Pudlicote’s skin still wet on Westminster’s door.’
‘And did you take it to yer kin, The Wallace?’ Hal asked.
‘Him?’
Jop was scorning and wiped some sweat from his palm across dry lips, watching the wink of the knife.
‘If ye see him, offer my blissin’,’ he said sourly. ‘God be wi’ The Wallace, for he ne’er took from a man but all he had.’
‘Meaning?’ demanded Hal, and Jop, his tongue like a lizard, spilled it all out like water from a spout.
He had sought out Wallace in the hope that his kin might shelter him and buy the gilded half-cross he had brought with him, for it was well known The Wallace had the hard cash of a dozen good raids.
Hal and Kirkpatrick shared brief glances.
‘So Wallace knows all this?’ demanded Kirkpatrick and Jop curled a lip.
‘Aye, he does. Laughed. Then took the shine,’ he said in a bitter whine. ‘I had six and Lamprecht had six. Bliddy Wallace took mine, for The Cause he says.’
He spat into the coals of the brazier.
‘Kin,’ he added venomously.
‘And the Rood?’ demanded Hal.
Jop’s face almost folded in half with the frown.
‘The Rood? Lamprecht had that, coveted it above all else… here, did he send ye?’
Hal and Kirkpatrick shot savage, stunned glances at each other, for it was clear the pardoner had cozened them all and lured them here. As if their thoughts had summoned up the Devil, the clank of a poor-iron bell above their heads was a shattering explosion.
Jop reeled up and bellowed with the shock of it, so that Kirkpatrick reared back; Jop, seeing his chance, lashed out and the blow slammed Hal backwards into the wall with a crack. Sim sprang forward and he and Jop locked with each other like rutting rams.
In an instant, all was chaos and fury. Sim and Jop strained and staggered, knocking over the brazier with a clatter, spilling hot coals in a glowing mockery of rubies; Kirkpatrick, cursing, started forward, was hit by the struggling pair and knocked sideways and over the kist.
Hal hauled himself up, saw the smoulder of old rushes and started stamping on the bloom of flame. Sim and Jop finally crashed into the bed, fell on it, broke the poles and rolled on to the floor. There was a thump and a roar, then Sim rose up and staggered back a step or two.
‘Ease up, Jop,’ he bellowed. ‘Doucely, man — we mean ye no harm.’
‘Murderers. Thieves. Lamprecht…’
Kirkpatrick fought the panic in him — the noise of the fight, the shouting, Hal’s mad stamping on flames was all fit to wake the dead in the crypt. Jop roared forward in a rush of fear and Sim, caught off balance, went sideways. Kirkpatrick, fast and unthinking as a hornet in a fist, whirled and struck.
Jop gave a coughing grunt, swayed a little with a look of amazement on his face as he stared at where Kirkpatrick had punched him… not a hard blow…
Then the dagger thrust to his heart felled him, and like a tree he crashed to the rushed floor, his head bouncing hard enough to let everyone know he was dead.
Hal’s feet finally stopped stamping on the flames.
‘Christ be praised,’ he murmured, shocked.
‘For ever and ever,’ Kirkpatrick intoned reverently, then wiped the dagger clean on Jop’s tunic, pinched out a
