Hugh Corbett 17 - The Mysterium Read Free

top of the door. Inside the cell it was dark; there were no windows, only a small slit high in the wall, wafer thin, no broader than a man’s finger, allowing a crack of light through the limestone brick at the base of the chapel wall. No lamp or candle burned, the murky darkness betrayed nothing except a shape sitting at a table.
    ‘Lord Walter,’ Serlo called. ‘Lord Walter!’ He banged on the door.
    ‘My lord abbot, perhaps he’s suffered a seizure?’ Cuthbert whispered. ‘His humours were much disturbed.’
    ‘He’s no prisoner, brother, despite what the King says.’ Serlo breathed heavily, stepping down from the tub. He kicked this away just as other lay brothers, summoned by the altar server, hurried down the steps shouting greetings to Brother Ogadon to quieten his grumbling bark. They crowded into the narrow passageway even as their abbot removed the outside bar and tried the door.
    ‘It is also secured from within,’ whispered Cuthbert. ‘My lord Walter always insisted on that. A bar is fastened to the inside lintel; it can be swung down. I don’t know why . . .’
    ‘Break it down!’ Serlo ordered.
    Cuthbert stood away.
    ‘Fetch what you have to.’ Serlo gestured at the door. ‘Just break it down.’
    The lay brothers organised themselves. Stout logs were brought. Abbot Serlo went up and knelt before the bleak altar in the corpse chapel. He recited the requiem for those who lay there and tried to suppress a deep chill of apprehension. Something was wrong. The King would not be pleased. Lord Walter Evesham had been a high and mighty justice, the terror of outlaws and wolfsheads, be it in the cavernous darkness of Westminster Hall or out on commissions of eyre, delivering jails and decorating scaffolds and gibbets the length and breath of the kingdom. Then he had fallen like a shooting star. The King had returned from Scotland to investigate matters in the city. Lord Walter had been weighed in the balance and found very much wanting. Serlo lowered his head, listening to the battering against the door below. Walter Evesham had fled here seeking sanctuary. He’d proclaimed that he was tired of the world, exchanging his silk and samite robes for the coarse hair shirt and rough sacking of a Benedictine recluse and demanding shelter and protection. Edward of England had openly jeered at this so-called conversion, but allowed his former justice to stay on one condition: that he never left the grounds or precincts of the Abbey of Syon. That had been two weeks ago . . .
    The crashing below and the sounds of ripping wood brought Serlo to his feet. Brother Cuthbert clattered up the steps.
    ‘Father Abbot, Father Abbot, you’d best come.’
    Serlo hurried to join him. Down in the eerie vaulted passageway, the lay brothers clustered together like frightened children. The door to the former justice’s cell had been ripped off its leather hinges and lay to one side, the wood around it much damaged where the inside bar had been torn away. The abbot stood on the threshold. A former soldier, a knight who’d served in Wales and along the Scottish march, he recognised, as he would an old enemy, the reek of violent death and spilt blood. He took the lantern horn from Cuthbert’s rheumatic hands, and walked through the shattered doorway and across to the table. The pool of dancing lanternlight picked out all the gory horror.Walter Evesham, former Chief Justice in the Court of King’s Bench and Lord of the Manor of Ingachin, lay slumped, head slightly to one side, his throat cut so deep it seemed like a second mouth. Blood caked Evesham’s dead face and drenched the top of his jerkin, forming a dark crust over the table and the pieces of jewellery littered there.

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    Botleas : a crime so serious, there can be no financial compensation
    ‘Archers forward, notch!’ Ranulf-atte-Newgate, Clerk in the Chancery of Green Wax, raised his sword and stared across the sprawling cemetery that ringed the ancient church of