An Excellent Mystery by Ellis Peters Page B

he had
ridden hard to await the early return he foresaw, with the news he had promised
to carry faithfully, whether good or bad. The stench of burning, old and acrid
now, met him on the wind some miles from Wherwell, and when he entered what was
left of the small town it was to find an almost de-peopled desolation. The few
whose houses had survived unlooted and almost undamaged were sorting through
their premises and salvaging their goods, but those who had lost their
dwellings in the fire held off cautiously as yet from coming back to rebuild.
For though the raiding party from Winchester had been either wiped out or made
prisoner, and William of Ypres had withdrawn the queen’s Flemings to their old
positions ringing the city and the region, this place was still within the
circle, and might yet be subjected to more violence.
    Nicholas
made his way with a cramped and anxious heart to the enclave of the nunnery,
one of the three greatest in the shire, until this disaster fell upon its
buildings and laid the half of them flat and the rest uninhabitable. The shell
of the church stood up gaunt and blackened against the cloudless sky, the walls
jagged and discoloured like decayed teeth. There were new graves in the nuns’
cemetery.
    As
for the survivors, they were gone, there was no home for them here. He looked
at the newly-turned earth with a sick heart, and wondered whose daughters lay
beneath. There had not yet been time to do more for them than bury them, they
were nameless.
    He
would not let himself even consider that she might be there. He looked for the
parish church and sought out the priest, who had gathered two homeless families
beneath his roof and in his barn. A careworn, tired man, growing old, in a
shabby gown that needed mending.
    “The
nuns?” he said, stepping out from his low, dark doorway. “They’re scattered,
poor souls, we hardly know where. Three of them died in the fire. Three that we
know of, but there may well be more, lying under the rubble there still. There
was fighting all about the court and the Flemings were dragging their prisoners
out of the church, but neither side cared for the women. Some are fled into
Winchester, they say, though there’s little safety to be found there, but the
lord bishop must try to do something for them, their house was allied to the
Old Minster. Others… I don’t know! I hear the abbess is fled to a manor near
Reading, where she has kin, and some she may have taken with her. But all’s
confusion — who can tell?”
    “Where
is this manor?” demanded Nicholas feverishly, and was met by a weary shake of
the head.
    “It
was only a thing I heard — no one said where. It may not even be true.”
    “And
you do not know, Father, the names of those sisters who died?” He trembled as
he asked it.
    “Son,”
said the priest with infinite resignation, “what we found could not have a
name. And we have yet to seek there for others, when we have found enough food
to keep those alive who still live. The empress’s men looted our houses first,
and after them the Flemings. Those who have, here, must share with those who
have nothing. And which of us has very much? God knows not I!”
    Nor
had he, in material things, only in tired but obstinate compassion. Nicholas
had bread and meat in his saddlebag, brought for provision on the road from his
last halt to change horses. He hunted it out and put it into the old man’s
hands, a meagre drop in a hungry ocean, but the money in his purse could buy
nothing here where there was nothing to buy. They would have to milk the
countryside to feed their people. He left them to their stubborn labours, and
rode slowly through the rubble of Wherwell, asking here and there if anyone had
more precise information to impart. Everyone knew the sisters had dispersed, no
one could say where. As for one woman’s name, it meant nothing, it might not
even be the name by which she had