The Butcher of Avignon Read Online Free

through her mind. Was he sick? Had the war between England and France broken out again? Was that perhaps the message Fitzjohn had brought last night?
    A glance across the bowed heads, already mouthing prayers, showed him say something to one of his pages with a scowl of annoyance. He bent his head to say something more and the page forced a path through the press towards the doors. One of the Cistercians also thought it a waste of time to hang about and followed in his wake.
    Hildegard closed her eyes. The prioress, content in Swyne, had no idea what her nun had to endure in her service. The Alps had been nothing to the tedium of waiting for someone who could not or would not deign to appear.
    **
    It was almost on tierce, the third hour, when a piercing fanfare cut through the mumblings of people too devout to leave their places to go to mixtum now being served in the refectory. The horn players looked delighted at having something to do at last. Hildegard craned her neck to see over the heads in front of her towards the door at the back of the dais.
    After another screech of the horns, the door inched open in the silence that followed. Then a dazzling, bejewelled figure appeared on the threshold. The silence lengthened.
    The guards, squaring their shoulders, gazed more ferociously at the invisible enemy in front of them. A sound like the wind rising echoed around the auditorium as people began to cross themselves and fall to their knees in a cloud of fabric.
    Clement, dark visaged, hook nosed, face as expressionless as a stump of wood, took several tottering paces towards his throne. His garments glittered in the sun light. Two silvery acolytes fussed in his wake and when he came to the steps leading up to his gilded throne they took an arm each to guide him onto it in his cumbersome robes. Before sitting, he turned and made a perfunctory sign over the heads of his flock.
    Everyone, Hildegard realised, was on their knees. Even the Cistercians near the door. As unobtrusively as possible she slid down the pillar she had been leaning against until she was kneeling, albeit in a cramped and crouching posture, at its foot. A glance backwards showed that the Cistercian who had followed Fitzjohn’s page outside had returned and followed him back in. For a moment he glanced out over the bent heads towards the dais, then he too, sank down among the rest.
    Clement’s voice carried easily into the corners of the vast hall. Latin, of course.
    ‘My faithful friends, my dearly beloved. Please rise to your feet.’ A sound of dull thunder followed. He began speaking only when all was quiet again. ‘I humbly beseech your pardon for this unwonted delay in starting our daily business. May your patience be rewarded here on earth as in heaven.’ He paused and clasped his hands helplessly, eyes darting from one corner of the chamber to the other. ‘I bear evil tidings, my friends. This day, sometime after matins, a most dreadful fate befell one of my beloved flock.’
    He paused again and Hildegard silently applauded his sense of the theatrical. His eyes were focussed on something in the roof beams. His guardian angel, maybe, although to look downwards to the pit of hell, she thought, might be more appropriate.
    After a sufficiently long pause he spoke in a soft voice. ‘Sometime after lauds a young thief was found in that most secret of places where our fortune is stored.’ A whisper of speculation arose but he stalled it with one raised hand. ‘I mean this as no reference to the soul of souls where each man’s fate is coiled but in that place where our wealth is stored, I mean where that gold belonging to all of us, is for safety kept, the better to further our ministry among the ungodly.’
    His black glance swept the crowd like a passing storm cloud.
    ‘Our treasury, of which many of you will be unaware, has been breached! To our sorrow we are not birds of the air. We cannot live on the crumbs of fortune. We must show prudence in