The Templar's Penance: (Knights Templar 15) Page 13

  ‘Please be seated,’ Baldwin said and motioned towards a stool.

  ‘I was to have married her next week,’ Ramón sighed.

  ‘I am terribly sorry.’

  ‘She would have made a perfect wife for a Brother. For me.’

  For a moment Baldwin feared that Ramón might burst into tears, his emotion was so plain, but then he gratefully took the cup Simon had poured and drank half in a gulp.

  ‘Did you meet her near here?’ Baldwin enquired.

  ‘It was on the pilgrim route from Tours. I had been to Orthez and was returning when I met her, and I fell in love with her immediately. To see her, to feel her sweetness and generosity, that was all I needed. I knew she was meant to be my wife.’

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  ‘Here, in the square. We went into the Cathedral, and when we left, her mistress told me that they were to go out for a ride, but that they would be back later. I said I would meet Joana when she returned, and her mistress gave us her blessing. It would obviously be an honour for her to have her maid wedded to a Knight of Santiago.’

  ‘Of course,’ Baldwin said without emphasis.

  ‘But she never came back. I didn’t see her again until you brought her back on that cart. Her face, her head …’ He swallowed.

  ‘Did you ever argue with her?’

  ‘You think I could have hurt her like that?’ Ramón cried out.

  ‘No. But it is a natural question. Others will wonder if you don’t answer.’

  ‘I never argued with her. I could not. It would be impossible. She was always so sweet and kind.’

  ‘Did she have enemies?’

  ‘No! You don’t know what you are suggesting! How could someone like my Joana have enemies?’

  ‘She was a good woman, I am sure,’ Baldwin said comfortingly.

  The sudden flush which had risen in Ramón’s face seeped away. He stared down into his cup, which Simon refreshed for him.

  Baldwin took a breath. ‘I have heard of another knight in the town. Perhaps you have seen him – a Don Ruy?’

  ‘No. I have never heard of him.’

  ‘Do you know of other people whom she knew, people who are here in the city?’ Baldwin enquired.

  ‘There was one. A man who calls himself Gregory. I think he is named Gregory of Coventry, an English name, but he speaks Galician fluently.’

  ‘Do you know where we might find this man?’

  ‘He was in the chapel with me just now, helping me to lay her out ready for burial, but I do not know where he is staying. He is a pilgrim. He said that he met my Joana because he knew Doña Stefanía.’

  ‘Where did she and her mistress travel from?’

  ‘They live south of here, but they had gone to Orthez. I returned with them yesterday. Doña Stefanía had been travelling with a band of men, but they left us the day before yesterday. I find it hard to understand how men could desert two women like that. For the sake of their own mothers, for the sake of Holy Mother Mary Herself, they should have protected my Joana and her lady. But at least I was there, and for that I should be grateful. Although now …’

  Frey Ramón drained his cup and refused when Simon offered to refill it. ‘I must go. I shall pray for my poor Joana in my chapel. I would not go to pray for her drunk. I thank you both for your kindness.’

  Standing, he bowed, turned and walked away, crossing the square. Baldwin and Simon watched, and neither spoke a word as the man disappeared from sight.

  Later, when the two were rolled up in blankets, having negotiated a space for themselves in an old stable at an inn, Baldwin snoring gently, Simon staring up at the ceiling, pensively considering reasons for a woman to be killed and her features so comprehensively ruined, Frey Ramón sat before the altar in his Order’s chapel, and bent his head. He wept. At his side, the chapel’s priest sat and prayed with him, stolidly speaking the prayers of the services for the dead woman, occasionally glancing sideways at Ramón as the man’s grief overwhelmed him. Once he put a hand out to touch Ramón’s shoulder, but the knight shrugged it away.

  There was no end to Ramón’s grief. Confused, shocked, seeing the whole of his future life destroyed, he was unsure what he should do after the terrible events of the day.

  ‘God, give me peace!’ he begged, but he knew that God couldn’t help him. The answers He must give could only lead to Ramón’s destruction.

  It was almost dawn when he stood and made his obeisance to the cross. He would have to leave. There was no place in Compostela for a man like him. He had made his decision. He would go to Portugal and hide himself there.

  After he had gone to his room and collected his few belongings, he returned to the priest and paid him for his vigil, then gave him a little more to arrange for the burial.

  ‘You must see that she is treated honourably,’ he stated. ‘Have her buried like an honourable woman. A good, kindly woman. A woman who was loved,’ he added, his voice choked.

  Then he turned on his heel and walked from the place, never to see it again.

  Simon woke in the middle watches of the night, groggy and chilled, with the faint sense that something was wrong. He had to pull his cloak back over himself, from where it had fallen.

  Their room was an old wine storage barn, containing huge casks of wine, which was occasionally used for guests when there was a glut of visitors. Simon and Baldwin were not the only men staying; there were several other bodies lying rolled in cloaks on the floor.

  The barn was a good forty feet long, and the roof was more than ten feet above their heads, giving a feeling of airiness or, as Simon reckoned at this godforsaken time of the night, of draughtiness. He could feel a rumbling in his belly. His bowels were unsettled, and he wondered if it was the rich food which he and Baldwin had tried the night before. One more piece of information which Baldwin had cheerfully shared with him was that people who travelled abroad could contract diseases from the bad air. Baldwin had seen it often in the warmer climates, so he said. Simon had no wish to go and experiment with the garderobe here in the dark, but he was uncomfortably aware that he might soon have little choice.

  It did not appeal. The toilet here was like others he had seen in England, but the whole structure looked extremely dilapidated. In his home, that didn’t matter. The outhouse was a light shack which was positioned over a hole in the ground, and every few weeks a new hole would be dug and the shack lifted over it. The muck could be dug out and used as manure, while a fresh crop was collected. Here, though, the toilet was a wooden projection from the wall of the barn. Because the barn had been built on a hillside, although the guests entered from the road’s level, when they walked out to the far side of the barn, they were one storey above the roadway. Here the owner had constructed a room which was in reality little more than a series of rotten-looking planks placed over the void and supported by the building on the opposite side of the alley. The intrepid person who wished to make use of this convenience, must dangle their buttocks over one of the two holes, trusting to faith that they would hit the target, which was a large wooden enclosure into which the muck from the cowshed underneath the wine store also drained.

  Simon was not keen to experience this in the pitch dark, and he turned his mind to other matters in an attempt to forget the growing urges.

  The dead woman had been murdered in a particularly brutal manner. It was possible that her lover could have done this. Ramón was her lover: it could have been him. Then there was the knight Don Ruy, who had followed her from the city. He could have been jealous because the girl shared her favours with Ramón and not with him. Or it could have been a passer-by, who had seen Joana there and decided to force himself on her.

  Lost in thought, Simon yawned lengthily. Soon his breathing calmed and he slept once more.

  In a large communal guestroom in the Cathedral’s precinct, Doña Stefanía lay wide awake.

  She was in a big, comfortable bed with a soft, plump mattress, trying to ignore the snoring
coming from the far side. Her bedfellow was a whuffling, snuffling heavy breather, whose periodic snivels were an atrocious interruption to a lady who was used to the privacy of her own room. Doña Stefanía was tempted to heave a shoe at her.

  Still, before long she would be able to return home to the convent at Vigo. That was the thought that consoled her through the long hours of darkness. At least when she got there, she would be able to set up the new chapel, with the Bishop’s help, and display the relic.

  It was all up to the Bishop. He might be reluctant. It had been known before. Sometimes a churchman was not happy to thieve another’s relic. Not often though, she reminded herself. A man would be a fool to thwart the Saint’s own will. In fact, no man would dare. She wasn’t sure, but the Doña had the impression that the Bishop of Compostela was not the sort to worry himself about that argument. He would reason that if he decided that the relic was not for Vigo, the Saint was making his opinion felt. However, it would be a big feather in his cap, were he to retain the thing. If it added to Doña Stefanía’s prestige, it likewise added to his own.

  She was content with that. The thing must remain with her, at all costs. It was the only way to ensure that her convent survived.

  A particularly loud snuffle made her bite back a caustic response. If only Joana was still here! She could have taken up one of the spaces in the bed, and the two of them together would have been intimidating enough to drive off another, unwanted companion.

  Poor Joana. All this was her plan, and now she would never see it come to fruition. She had been so keen for it to happen. Yet all had started to go wrong when she met Ramón. From that day on, Joana had grown more peevish and difficult – perhaps because of something he knew about her?

  The thought was worth considering. He certainly seemed to have some sort of hold over her. Perhaps that was the matter: he was a difficult, jealous lover. Perhaps he wanted more than she was prepared to give him, or had decided to take more than she wanted to give. What if she had gone to the meeting with Ruy, and Ramón saw her return? Would he not be enraged to think that his woman could have gone secretly consorting with another knight? It was eminently possible.

  But if that was the case, then where, she wondered, returning to the main point, where was all her money? Someone had taken it.

  But who?

  Simon was suddenly wide awake again, his belly rumbling urgently. It was almost pitch black outside, with no more than a faint luminescence to indicate the roofs and yards. As he reluctantly climbed to his feet, he could feel the beginning of a griping pain in his belly; there was no doubt that his bowels were out of order.

  It was an unwholesome prospect. There was something about illnesses of the belly that always alarmed him. He had a morbid fear of them, which was exacerbated by the distance from home, as though any such disease must be more virulent, the farther he travelled from Devon. It was not an irrational phobia, for diarrhoea could kill an adult as easily as a child, when the balance of the humours was disturbed. Some years before, Simon had witnessed the death of his own son, Peterkin, and the horror of that gradual fading away would never entirely leave him.

  Here, in the middle of the night, he was struck by a sharp sadness. For perhaps the first time in his life, he actually pictured his own death. He could imagine Meg, his wife, hearing of it from Baldwin, he could see her weeping, his daughter Edith sobbing uncontrollably, his servant Hugh stoically sniffing, a fixed scowl twisting his features. He might easily die here, over the next few days, and never see any of them again. The thought was hideous. He had to put the idea away from him! He wasn’t going to die here, he would return home to see his wife and daughter, and he would be fine again.

  Naked, Simon pulled a jack on against the cool night air, and then had to step carefully over the seven or eight prone figures who littered his path on the way to the rear wall. Before he was halfway, he could see nothing. There was only a deeper blackness before him than that which lay behind.

  The door to the noisome little room was a thick blanket suspended by rings hanging from a pole. Simon had to feel his way along the wall, stumbling against one of the massive racks which supported the casks, and then his finger, fumbling, felt the edge of a length of cloth. He pulled at it and walked cautiously forward, but as he moved, his foot snagged on a plank and he tripped forward, cracking his head painfully on a projecting stone.

  After a few moments which were filled with an awfully pregnant silence, all the obscenities which sprang to his mind appearing woefully inadequate, Simon took a deep breath and reached forward. This time he carefully felt around the area and found where the planks lay in which the holes had been cut. Finding one, he turned, reversed into position, and sat thankfully.

  From here, suddenly the room looked as though it was filled with a silver light. The open doorway was a bright rectangle, and as he felt the boards settling underneath him, he wondered fleetingly whether he would plummet to earth sitting here.

  Thankfully, he and the boards survived and he made it back to his sleeping space without mishap, but even then he didn’t fall asleep immediately. He lay wrapped in his robe on a bench, hands behind his head, and stared out into the night, thinking mostly of the dead body, but also of the devastated face of Frey Ramón. He had said he last saw Joana in the square.

  Could the man have been lying? Was he capable of murdering his own woman – and if so, why?

  The next morning there was the sort of dawn Baldwin remembered from his service in the Templars. Small, thin clouds floated high overhead; the sky was a perfect, silken blue, impossibly beautiful. It made the limewashed buildings shine as though they had been deliberately created to make the eyes ache.

  For once, Simon woke before Baldwin, and was out in the yard sluicing water over his head and shoulders when a mangy cur entered their room, cocked a leg over Baldwin’s baggage, then went on to sniff and dribble over Baldwin’s head.

  Waking, the knight always thought, was a reinvigoration. It was a process by which the body stirred itself from near-death back to life; however, being woken by a flea-bitten mutt which had just pissed over his clothing was less invigorating than he would have liked. Roaring at the little creature, which folded back its ears and streaked from the room like a dog catching a speeding arrow, Baldwin sprang from his makeshift bed and surveyed his clothing. The dog had not had a good life, and the yellow spray stood out on his linen shirt. It stank.

  ‘Good morning!’ Simon called.

  ‘And a nice joke that is, I am sure,’ Baldwin retorted grumpily.

  ‘What joke?’

  ‘Saying it’s a good morning. What’s good about it?’

  But his bad humour faded when he stood at the doorway and could see the sun bursting through the branches of pale leaves, dappling the little yard with shadows that moved gently as the breeze blew. There were soft colours here, pale yellows and ochres, and flowers Baldwin had known when he used to live in the South: plants with rich purple blooms, others with bright red leaves, and olive trees with their tiny, green-white star-shaped flowers. The sight caught at his heart. He felt as though he had come back home, as though he had only been half alive in all the time that he had been living in England.

  He had missed this. The scents on the air, the sound of people laughing and talking unhurriedly, knowing that today would be warm again. If there was to be rain, it was no matter. The rain was needed in order to preserve the plants. And if it rained, it would be warm, not the chill mizzle they were used to, out on Dartmoor.

  The last time he had been to Southern Europe was so long ago, he could hardly recall it, and yet seeing Matthew in the square had brought it all back to him. Now, with the soft breeze stirring the leaves above him, Baldwin felt oddly excited. It was in a warm climate where he had first felt the urges of lust, chasing girls along alleys in the sunshine to snatch a kiss or rolling in the long grasses with the sun warming their naked bodies. Suddenly aware of a poignant longing for her, he wished his wife Jeanne w
as with him.

  At the inn, the keeper’s older daughter took Baldwin’s pack and promised to launder it. The people of the town went upriver a short distance to where there was a series of rocks on which their washing could be beaten and then left to dry, she said.

  ‘I hope she’s careful,’ Simon commented as she departed.

  Baldwin, who was feeling a little constricted in one of Simon’s cast-off shirts, grunted. ‘Why?’

  ‘It sounds like the place where we found Joana yesterday. I wouldn’t like to think that there could be another murder.’

  Baldwin set his mouth. The death of the woman was a terrible reminder that no matter how holy the city, men still harboured motives to kill. ‘I wonder if Munio will ever learn who killed her?’

  ‘I doubt it.’ Simon cast a look at Baldwin. ‘I was considering it last night while you snored. The sad fact is, any number of people here could be felons, so how could you tell? A pilgrim is automatically to be assisted by all, regardless of age, sex, or whether he has murdered even. A murderer would be safe from the rope until he returned home to face the law. And that’s what gets to me: so many people here have set out on their journey for precisely that reason – because they are guilty of something. That’s why pilgrims come here, after all, to atone. They commit some terrible sin, and travel all this way to pay for it.’

  ‘True enough, I fear,’ Baldwin responded sadly; it was certainly true in his case. ‘Many towns in Europe will impose a pilgrimage on a murderer.’

  The two left the place and walked through the shaded alleyway out to the square. This early in the morning, there were fewer people abroad, and Simon and Baldwin saw that the inn where they had drunk with Munio the night before was open and ready for business. They sat at a table under a large tree and were soon happily chewing coarse bread and dried meat, washing it down with a smooth, sweet cider.

  Simon gave a contented belch. ‘What if every single pilgrim here was a killer? We’d have our work cut out then!’