across her mouth. We stared at each other for a moment, our ragged breathing amplified unnaturally in the vault, until I burst out laughing. I could hear the hysterical note in it as Meg joined in, prompted by relief.
“Dear God—damned creature nearly gave me a seizure,” I whispered, and heard my voice shaking. She nodded, but the laughter had died on her lips as her gaze travelled over the old tombs that lined the walls. I was still holding the soiled sack; it was crusted stiff with some foul substance. With great reluctance I brought it closer to my face to sniff it and dropped it almost instantly as I caught the faint iron tang of dried blood. Meg coughed violently behind me and gagged as she did so.
That unbelievable smell: as I stood up it caught again in my throat and I had to press a hand over my mouth, swallowing hard to stop my gorge rising. I sniffed the air, trying to trace the worst of it to its source, which seemed to be one tomb set into the wall beside the bricked-in staircase. I knelt and read the inscription: “Hugh de Wenchepe, Prior, 1263–1278.” I glanced up at Meg, who had come to stand at my shoulder; her face seemed even whiter in the shadows, her eyes fixed on the tomb of the long-dead prior with an expression of dread. I guessed that the old housekeeper thought she knew what had been hidden here, and I was gripped by the same awful sense of anticipation. I should have realised it the moment I opened the door. I had been in old tombs and burial vaults before; the ancient dead smelled of dust and mould. Yet Prior Hugh’s coffin gave off a ripe stink like an abattoir, as if he had been rotting there for only a few months. A chill ran through me and as I held the lantern over his blank- eyed marble face I noticed the marks: the tracks of human fingers in the dust at the edges of the tomb’s lid, where it had been recently opened.
“Meg—hold this for me, will you?”
I handed her my lantern; though I sensed her reluctance, she took it and held it above the bier as I leaned in with both hands to try and move the stone cover. This was no easy task; Prior Hugh’s tomb was neatly carved to fit its alcove in the wall and the only way to open it was to slide the heavy stone towards me, with the fear that, even supposing I managed to budge it alone, it might at any moment topple forwards, crushing my leg or, at the very least, shattering so that it could not be replaced. In vain I struggled, straining with all the strength I possessed, only to see the slab shift no more than a couple of inches. Whoever had moved it before must have had help; two men might lift it between them, but I was not willing to admit defeat, having come so far. I muttered a prayer in Italian as I grabbed the left elbow of the effigy where the prior’s hands were bent in prayer, to give myself better purchase. Bracing one foot against the wall of the tomb, I pulled on the statue’s arm; with a great grinding of stone, I felt the slab lurch forward a couple of feet as the smell of putrefaction gusted upwards from the gaping blackness beneath. “Santa Maria!” I cried, spinning away from the tomb into a corner where, leaning with one arm against the wall, I vomited up my supper and a quantity of sweet red wine.
Meg waited patiently by the tomb, still holding the light, snatching breaths through the fabric of her sleeve. When I had wiped my mouth I turned back. Her face was unbearably bleak.
“We should leave, sir,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “Leave the dead to their rest. Else we shall both take ill of the contagion.”
“Not now,” I said, recovering myself a little, though my voice was barely a croak. “Whatever is in here holds the answer, I am sure of it. I need you to take the light again, Meg, if you can bear it for a while longer.” She hung back, understandably, though she did not take her eyes from the lid of the tomb and the hole under it.
Expelling the drink from my body seemed to have done me good; my head felt clearer as I rolled up my shirtsleeves higher and asked Meg to hold the lantern directly over the opening beneath the stone slab, which was about two feet at its widest end. I took a deep breath and leaned in, as the candle flame threw my own shadow like a giant on the wall behind me.
I made out the shape of a corpse wrapped in a thin linen shroud that appeared grey and horribly stained. I directed Meg to bend closer with the light and lifted one corner of the cloth, then jumped back as a hand fell from the wrappings onto the body’s chest. The flesh was blotched and partly blackened, but still intact, the fingernails long and curled over like claws. It was quite clear that this body did not belong to a prior dead for three centuries but had been put in Prior Hugh’s tomb recently. But how recently? Despite the smell, the body did not seem to be in an advanced state of decay, almost as if it had been artificially preserved. Besides, the hand was too small to be a man’s.
A thought struck me then; I clenched my teeth tightly and peeled back the shroud over the face. I flinched as the linen came free, taking pieces of discoloured skin with it. Beside me, Meg turned away with a soft gasp. To gaze on the frailty of our human frame is always appalling and this face seemed more so than any corpse I had seen. Tufts of fair hair still stuck to the blackened scalp. Its features were frozen in a terrible grimace, the lips pulled back to expose the teeth, the eyes staring, the cheeks sunken in, and although the body had begun to putrefy it looked as if an effort had been made by whoever buried it to slow the effects of decay by some amateur process of embalming. It might have lain there a month or several. Worst of all, it was clear that the body was that of a boy, not yet full-grown. I turned to Meg and saw that her eyes were brimming with tears.
“Did you know?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“I swear, sir, no. But I had wondered … Is it the beggar child?”
“Beggar?”
“I saw him only once, sir. Last autumn, before the lady Kate came to us. It was supposed to be my day off, but I came in because the timber merchant had to change his delivery day, and there was Master in the kitchen feeding this lad bread and milk. Terrible skinny thing he was, half starved. He never came back and Master gave me to understand it was not to be mentioned again. But sometimes I noticed food was missing …” Her voice trailed off into silence.
“You think he kept the boy down here?” I glanced behind me to the frayed rope. “Sweet Jesus. Why? What did he do to him?”
Meg only closed her eyes very slowly, as if this might erase the horror before us. There was one obvious reason why a man might keep a young boy prisoner, but nothing I had heard about Sir Edward suggested this was his vice. Had he procured the boy for others, I wondered—his influential friends, perhaps? Poor, poor child, I thought, sickened to the guts by the thought of the boy tied up in this place of death, no doubt terrified out of his wits. I was seized by an urge to run, out of the putrid air, away from the horror of the place. I leaned over and took a last look at that dreadful face, and that was when I noticed a glint of metal in the depths of the tomb.
“Bring the light closer,” I whispered urgently, as I reached in, steeling myself against the touch of that flesh under my fingers.
The corpse wore a silver chain around its neck; shreds of skin caught in the links as I pulled it to the front. Hanging from the chain was a round medallion, engraved with an image that I could not make out. I took the light from Meg and brought it so close to the face that were it not for the lantern glass I would have singed the creature’s hair. The medallion showed the figure of a man carrying a bishop’s staff in one hand and his own severed head under the crook of the other arm. The head was smiling and wore a mitre. “
“What is it?”
I scrabbled to unclasp the chain, causing the corpse’s head to bob up and down in my haste.
“This is no beggar boy,” I said, as I finally pulled it loose and held the medallion up. “See this? It shows the figure of Saint Denis.” When she looked uncomprehending, I continued, “The patron saint of Paris. And the namesake of a young French boy who disappeared some six months ago.”
Her eyes widened and with her free hand she made the sign of the cross. “Then there was more than one.”
“There was a beggar child found though, wasn’t there? Dismembered, on a midden.” I glanced back at the corner where I had seen the blood-soaked sacks. They were large enough to carry a child’s severed corpse.
“They arrested a vagrant for that, though,” Meg said, her eyes still riveted to the tomb. “An old man, one of the former monks.” She shook her head. “May God have mercy on us all.” Fresh tears spilled down her cheeks. I closed the medallion in my fist and turned to face her.
“You guessed at this, didn’t you?”
“Not this”—she gestured towards the tomb—“I will swear it by everything I hold dear! If I had known …” She left the thought unfinished.
I recalled Langworth’s brisk words to Samuel concerning her.
“Meg—there are others, your master’s friends. They may believe you know more than you do. I fear you too
