Through the windows could be seen the hills, gentle in sunlight; Brother John moved his eyes from the disquieting Christ-figure, rested them on the horizon. Time passed as he watched the moving clouds, their slow miles-off white billowing; when Father Meredith finally spoke, his voice came as a faint shock. ‘Brother John,’ he said. ‘Something… ah… interesting has occurred.’
John felt a slight rise of hope. Perhaps after all his Abbott hadn’t sent for him to rap his knuckles over some half-forgotten crime. He contrived, as far as his mobile eyebrows would allow, a look of interest combined with a suitably devout submissiveness. The attempt met with a somewhat qualified success. Father Meredith clicked his fingers irritably. ‘You may speak, Brother…’ The Adhelmians were a mild order of artisans and craftsmen; the daily silence was about their only firm rule but it was adhered to rigidly. John swallowed gratefully. ‘Thank you, Reverend Father…’ He faltered. At this stage, there was little else to say.
Father Meredith scanned his papers again and cleared his throat; a little distantsounding noise, sheeplike. ‘Er… yes. It seems we have been asked to supply an… ah… artist. The whole affair’s a little mysterious, I don’t know a great deal about it as yet myself; but I felt a… change of air shall we say, Brother, might be… beneficial Brother John bowed his head humbly. It seemed likely Master Albrecht had had something to do with that last remark; John had never really seen eye to eye with him since the business of the bear fat. And something too in the intonation of the single word ‘artist’… In matters spiritual, John had always been more than willing to be led; in things aesthetic though, he was constantly guilty of the sin of Pride. ‘I am entirely,’ he murmured, ‘at the Reverend Father’s disposal…’
‘Hmph,’ said the Abbott, sharply. He continued for a moment to observe John over the upper rims of his glasses. He was well enough aware of the other’s background. John came of poor parents; his family were, and had been for generations, cobblers in Durnovaria. From an early age John had showed no inclination to follow the family trade; set to a last, he would be discovered chalking pictures on the workbench, making furtive crayon sketches of the faces of his brothers and the customers in the little shop. His father had more than once taken a broad strap to the miscreant and endeavoured to knock out Hell and make room for a little Heaven; but the plump little boy, in other respects an amiable and easygoing child, proved unexpectedly stubborn. Chalks or pencils were seldom out of his hands; when he could draw with nothing else he used charcoal from the grates or heelball. His pictures and scrawlings lined the rough walk of his room; his proper work became more erratic than ever. It seemed the only thing to do was to let him follow his bent; at least, his father reasoned, the family would be relieved of the necessity of feeding a useless mouth. In this England there was only one way in which John’s talent might be employed; he took Holy Orders and at the age of fourteen became a novice in the monastery of Saint Adhelm, some twenty-odd miles from his home.
The first few months were a trying time both for the young pupil and his instructors; as a working-class child John had naturally never learned to read, and this instead of art became the first concern. The novice sensed finally that only through his letters would he ever achieve his real ambition; he sweated over his books, and a year later was formally admitted to the classes held in the monastery by Brother Pietro, the drawing master.
Even then John was doomed to disappointment; life drawing was not permitted, and the young student spent restless hours working from the cast. The antique study improved his line and gave him a measure of discipline he had hitherto lacked, but left him unfulfilled. Lithography had been his salvation; though at first he loathed its complexity, and the long dry history of it from Senefelder’s laundry list onwards that Brother Pietro insisted he learn by heart, the colour and texture of the stones and the many ways ‘of working them appealed to the latent craftsman in him. While fine art was seldom required, there was technical challenge in the most mundane commercial jobs; John worked diligently, restyling over the years the entire range of bottle and package labels produced by the House. Master Albrecht, recognising if not a genius at least a firstrate craftsman, left him largely to his own devices, and by his thirtieth birthday John had become well known in professional circles. (He sometimes referred to himself, with wry humour, as the Master of the Bottle of Sauce.) Brewing was only one of the industries in which the Church had extensive interests, and commissions began to come in from other centres and ecclesiastic business houses lacking their own creative staff. The subsequent swelling of the coffers of the Adhelmians had been the main reason why John’s occasional outbursts of temperament had been tolerated without too much complaint, even by the peppery Master of Lithography. John was a good draughtsman and, left to go his own way, a keen worker; these qualities the Adhelmians had always valued more than slavish obedience to principles and a more or less sterile piety. Though there had been times, there had been times…
Brother John broke in on his superior’s thought stream. ‘Reverend Father, could you… I mean have you any idea of the nature of the work?’
‘None.’ The Abbott was being somewhat less than frank; he turned over the papers on his desk, shuffled them into a heap and spread them out once more. ‘I can tell you this much, it will involve a considerable journey. You’ll be going to Dubris; when you arrive you’ll put yourself at the disposal of Bishop Loudain. You can expect to be gone for some months, probably throughout the sittings of the… ah… Court of Spiritual Welfare, under Father Hieronymous. I can assure you the work will be of some… ah… importance, you’ll be holding a direct commission from Rome.’ He coughed again, looked embarrassed, fiddled with a stylus. ‘You’ll be performing a task of lasting value, Brother,’ he said stiffly. ‘A real service to the Church. Better than beer labels, when you’ve done and said all. Ehh…?’
Brother John stayed silent. His mind, accustomed to jogging in its own grave channels, was for once working furiously. There was a lot to be said for the proposition; as Father Meredith had pointed out, it would mean a change of air; and a journey across England in springtime, always to John’s mind the most attractive part of the year. And in any case it looked as if his freedom of choice was severely limited; if Master Albrecht, for his own purposes, wanted him out of the way for a time, it behoved him to go. There was professional pride too; his selection was a mark of honour, he knew that well enough. But… nothing decent, nothing good, would ever come out of the doings of the Court of Spiritual Welfare, Father Meredith knew that as well as anybody else. Because there had once been another name for the Court, a name that even in the Church-owned West had fallen into evil repute. The Inquisition…
John entered the great castle of Dubris by the Old Gate amid a noisy crowd of sightseers; mendicants, soldiers, townsfolk out for the day with picnic hampers and beer, the men swaggering in their Sunday best, the women with children hanging bawling round their skirts. Inside, the little monk paused involuntarily; the red-robed priest who was his guide waited impatiently, fidgeting with the heavy-bound books he carried, stepping from one foot to the other in the jostling of the mob. In front of John reared the second curtain; above it, sullen against the sky, was the huge donjon, daunting with its size and closeness. In the outer bailey, curving right as far as the great barbican of the Constable’s Gate, an entire fairground had established itself. Steam plumed in the air; organs, Marenghis and Gaviolis, bellowed and clashed their endless tunes; automata conducted jerkily; bare golden nymphs swirled, horses and fabulous beasts glared from the rides. Performing dogs barked and howled, dark-skinned men spat gouts of fire; dancers and jugglers postured, sideshows promised all the erotica of the East. Nearby, on platforms improvised from trestles and beer crates, cudgel-players split their opponents’ heads over boards already brown-daubed with blood, lithe boys in tight breeches of pale blue cloth lashed each other’s legs raw with thin switches of hazel. Between the stalls ran children, girls and boys; there were priests, fortune-tellers, sailors with tarred pigtails sticking out jauntily from their necks, arm in arm with bosomy laughing women; the Papal Blue was much in evidence, and the scarlet robes of Inquisition officers scurrying on various errands. All was noise, colour, and confusion. From near the donjon smoke rose in a column, staining the sky; over the great place, beside the cobalt pennant of Pope John, flew the blood-red standard of the Court.
The guide tugged at John’s sleeve; he followed, bemused by the uproar. They headed for the inner barbican, the priest shoving and pushing to clear a way through the crowd. Against the bailey wall was an added attraction; a line of cages, open to the sky, housed the first batch of prisoners. Round them the crowd boiled and yelled. John, staring, saw a man lashing at his tormentors with a staff he had somehow wrested from one of them; his eyes were suffused, flecks of foam covered his beard. Further on an old woman railed, shaking scrawny fists; her head had been cut, it seemed by a stone, and blood striped her face and neck brightly. Next to her a pretty, long-haired girl defiantly suckled a baby. John turned aside frowning deeply, followed the flapping robes of the priest into the upper bailey. His duties had already been explained to him; he was to record, for the benefit of Rome, all stages in the procedure of the Court of Father Hieronymous, Witchfinder in General to Pope John. His task would begin with the Questioning of prisoners.
The room set apart for the purpose was located beneath the donjon itself, and reached by a spiral stair. John passed through the Great Hall, its crosswall hung now with scarlet in preparation for the work to come. At the head
