‘You were up there?’
‘After the coining. Aye, on the fast day, Friday.’
‘You are almoner and may pass beyond our doors, but why did you need to go up to the moors that day?’
‘My Lord Abbot, I had to take alms to John, your shepherd with the hurt leg.’
‘Oh! Young John? And then you came back?’
‘Aye, but slowly. I was born in the wilds of the northern March, and the open spaces are in my nature.’
‘You should have your humours tested then, Brother. You should be content with God’s company here in the abbey.’
‘I try to be content,’ he said, his tongue clicking in his mouth, it had become so dry.
‘Do so. Did you see any man up there?’
‘Only Walwynus. He was returning to his little hovel.’
The abbot gazed at him. ‘I see. Did you speak to him?’
‘I called out to him, but he didn’t seem to want to chat. He was crapulous, I fear.’
‘Did you follow along behind him?’
‘I went up to the moors, aye. And I came back. But I saw no dead man up there, my Lord Abbot.’
‘No. Because if you had, of course you would have come back here and told me, wouldn’t you? So that we could try to save the man’s soul.’
‘Aye, my Lord Abbot.’
The abbot stared at him for a moment. ‘And this was the same Walwynus whom you knew, wasn’t it, Peter?’
‘He was in the group who did this to me,’ Peter said harshly, touching the scar again. ‘I’d not be likely to forget him, Abbot. Yet I had forgiven him, and I wouldn’t have harmed him. In fact, I spoke to him and told him that he was forgiven, on the day of the coining.’
‘How so?’
‘I met him before the coining began, and told him. It was the first time I’d spoken to him since the attack on me,’ Peter added thoughtfully. ‘It was most curious, speaking to him again like that. I fear he was terrified. Probably thought I’d beat his head in.’
‘For wounding you like that?’
‘Aye. That and other things,’ Peter said, but he didn’t elaborate.
Gerard was relieved to be out of the church, as always, but he felt no great comfort. His predicament weighed too heavily on his mind.
He had been out in the courtyard when the tall, grim-faced bailiff had returned, bellowing for messengers, for grooms and for the abbey’s man of law. Moments after he had stalked off to the abbot’s lodging, his discovery had been bruited all about the community. The dead man up on the moors was definitely Walwynus.
The news that Wally was dead – that was really scary. All the novices and brothers were talking about it, especially the odd one or two who had a superstitious bent. The parallels between the story of Milbrosa and this dead man were too tempting: the thefts of the abbot’s wine followed by the murder of a tinner on the moors. Of course the miner hadn’t been dumped in a bog, nor was he hugely rich, and there was no indication that a monk had anything to do with it, but that didn’t stop them talking. There was little else of excitement ever happened in a monastery, after all.
Later, walking from the abbey church out to the dorter, he felt the skin of his back crawling. He anticipated the thunderbolt of God’s wrath at any time. At the very least he thought he deserved to be stabbed, to have his life expunged.
He’d seen the bailiff before, and knew who Simon was, what his duties were. The man was bound to sense what Gerard had done. In fact, Gerard thought he could see the recognition in Simon’s face. When the bailiff looked at him, there was that expression of confused suspicion on his features, like a hound which has seen his quarry, but is doubtful because the beast doesn’t run. Gerard had seen that sort of expression on a dog’s face once when he was out hunting. A buck hare was there, sitting up on his haunches, but as soon as he caught sight of Gerard and his dog, he had fallen flat down on his belly, ears low, and fixed as stationary as a small clod of earth.
His dog was all for running at the thing, but Gerard knew it could easily outrun his old hound, and anyway, there was no need to set the dog after it: Gerard knew hares. He made the dog sit, and then walked away, up and around the hedge. The hound stared at him as though he was mad, and then returned to gaze suspiciously at the hare, which simply gazed back at him.
Gerard had no idea why hares would do it, but a hare would watch moving things rather than a man. He’d been shown the trick by an old countryman years before: the man had seen a hare, and rather than set the dogs free, he’d walked closer, then hurled his coat away. The hare stared at it as it flew past, and meanwhile the man circled around it until he could grab it by the neck and quickly wring it.
The same thing almost happened with Gerard’s hare that day. He left his hound there, sitting, while he took off his jacket and screwed it up into a ball, throwing it as far as he could. He tried to circle around behind the hare, but it didn’t work. Something alarmed the animal, and it bolted before Gerard had managed to get halfway. He turned to his dog to order him on.
The hound needed no second urging. He hurled himself forward, muscles cording under his glossy coat, and pelted off, but the hare had too much of an advantage. It had escaped beneath a tree-root, through a tiny gap in the hedge, and was gone, while Gerard’s hound sniffed and whined and paced up and down, trying to find a gap broad enough to wriggle
