“I am dead.” He gave a far-off smile and pointed at himself. “Look here—is this not the face of a corpse? I have been dead these fifty years.”
“What did you mean about the children?” I asked, still in Latin.
The old man’s eyes opened wider, his face tight with fear.
“ ‘But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea,’ ” he quoted again, this time from the Gospel of Matthew. “This is the word of the Lord.” He shook my arm, as though willing me to understand. “Better a millstone around his neck,” he repeated, his unfocused gaze sliding off me and around the walls.
“Whose neck?” I persisted.
“The one who hurts the children,” he hissed, snapping his attention back to me so suddenly that I flinched again, and it was as if a wick caught light in my mind. Meg said an old monk had been arrested for the murder of the dismembered child on the rubbish heap. Was that what he was trying to tell me about, in his confused way?
“Do you know him? The one who hurt the children?” I was gripping his hand harder now.
“It was not me!” he cried out, in English, as if someone had struck him. “I didn’t touch him!”
“ ’Course you didn’t, mate,” said a rough voice from the shadows across the room. “None of us did.” One or two of the others laughed weakly, until they lapsed back into their defeated silence.
“I know you didn’t hurt him,” I said softly to the old monk. “But who did?”
He fell silent and shook his head, and I thought I had lost him. I sat back, frustrated. Perhaps it was only the ramblings of a madman, after all. But he did not sound as if he had lost his wits—at least, no more than anyone would in a place like this.
“I only prayed for him,” he whispered, reverting to Latin, just when I thought he would not speak again. “That poor child. He left him there, like offal. I sat by him all night and prayed for his little soul, that was all. Our Lord welcomed the children.” He looked up as if imploring me to understand. Tears coursed down his cheeks. I stroked the back of his hand and nodded. I sensed that I was close to something vital here, and I did not want to ruin it by pushing the old man too hard; these memories were touching some deep grief in him.
“Where did you find him? Was it on the midden?” I prompted, cautiously.
“You saw it too?” His eyes widened, and he shook his head. He leaned closer, fixing me with his milky eye. “Cut in pieces. Such wickedness. He was a good child. Always a smile, for all he had nothing of his own. All I did was keep vigil and pray to Saint Thomas for his innocent soul. I told them that. I couldn’t harm a living creature. Do you know the worst of it?” He rubbed the tears away with the back of his hand, leaving grimy streaks down his face. “They claimed I butchered him for food, driven mad by hunger. For
“Of course.” I could guess what had happened; the old monk had been found by the boy’s body and blamed for his murder. “You said ‘he left him.’ Who? Did you see him—the man who put the boy there?”
“The tall one.” His eyes drifted away again.
“Yes, that’s him.” I tried not to sound too eager. “You remember him? What did he look like?”
The old monk frowned, seemingly lost in the dusty corridors of memory. I wondered if anything he dredged up would contain a grain of truth or if he was mixing up recollections of different times and places from a long life, as old men do.
“Tall, he was. Thin.”
“Old or young?”
“I don’t know. Everyone looks young to me.” He broke into a cackle at this and I waited patiently while he recovered from the coughing fit it brought on. Finally he spat a gobbet of phlegm into the straw and looked back to me, his face serious. “He was bald, like me, but not old like me. You understand? But I didn’t see him close. He brought bread one evening and gave it out to the children that beg outside the walls. He spoke to them. After he’d gone, the boy—that poor boy—shared his bread with me, because I’d not eaten for days. I never saw him again until he dropped out of a sack in pieces.” He shuddered violently and clawed at my arm again.
“Was it night? Could you be sure it was the same man?”
He must have caught the urgency in my voice, because his eyes grew frightened and he seemed to shrink inside the rags that hung off his skeletal frame. He turned his face away.
“Sure … I am sure of nothing anymore, son, except that soon I will face judgement. And that I will not live to see Saint Thomas return to Canterbury.”
I stiffened.
“He will return, then? You are sure of that?”
The old monk turned his head slowly back to me, his face lit by a sly smile, like a child hugging a great secret to himself.
“He never left us.”
“It is true, then?” I whispered, though I doubted any of the prisoners around us understood Latin. “Where is he?”
A glimmer of life sparkled in the rheumy eyes. He gave a low, cracked laugh.
“Only the guardians can tell you that. And they are sworn to silence. Men have died to protect the secret of his bones.”
“Which men? When?”
He leaned in, his face earnest.
“You want to know the story?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
“It was near fifty years ago, you understand? In some houses, the monks who would not take the new religion were executed as traitors, their quarters nailed to the city gates. But Canterbury surrendered willingly. No monk here died on King Henry’s orders.” He left a significant pause. The emphasis had been on King Henry.
“But on someone else’s orders, then?”
His fingers tightened around my wrist.
“The night they moved Becket’s bones, I saw what I should not have seen. I could not sleep and had gone to pray in the chapel of Saint Andrew, near to the great shrine of Saint Thomas. I hid when I heard the door, because I should not have been out of the dormitory and did not want to give account of myself to the prior.”
I nodded, half smiling, recalling the nights I had spent sneaking around the monastery, trying to avoid being caught by the abbot with my forbidden books.
“Five men came,” the old man continued, his breath buzzing hot against my ear, “carrying between them what looked like a coffin. Some while later they left carrying one likewise. So I followed them at a distance. They were taking it to the crypt.”
“Who were they?”
“They kept their cowls up. But one I saw by the light of the lantern he carried to guide the others—he was the assistant cellarer. A seven-night later he was dead.”
“How?”
“A fall, on a staircase in the tower. But he was one who had said he would not take the oath of allegiance to the king. No one knew, then, what the consequences of that might be.”
“So”—I frowned, trying to follow his reasoning—“you think the others were afraid he might be tortured and reveal the truth about Becket’s body?”
He nodded.
“I think they wanted to be sure of his silence. And he was not the only one. The day the king’s commissioners came and broke open the shrine, when they ground the saint’s bones into dust before our eyes so nothing remained as a holy relic, no monk standing there believed it was truly Saint Thomas. But we dared not speculate aloud.”
“But those who knew where the real body was hidden must all be dead by now?”
“They say there were four guardians, to match the number of Becket’s murderers. Each guardian hands on the secret to one who keeps the old faith in his heart, in preparation for the day England returns to the true Church, like the prodigal son.” He passed a hand over his brow. “But who the guardians are now, I cannot tell you. Ask me no more, son. They will hang me this time for certain, and I am ready. I am weary of this life. God knows I have
