The Nameless Day. Sara Douglass
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What did it contain?”
“I do not know.”
“Does it remain in the friary?”
“No. Wynkyn took it with him on his final journey north.”
“In Advent of the first year of pestilence.”
“Yes.” Bertrand hunched even further on the stool. Why hadn’t he destroyed those records earlier?
“And Wynkyn did not return from Nuremberg?”
“No. I presume he died of the pestilence.”
“And the book?”
“Wynkyn took it with him encased in an oaken casket. I presume it lies wherever Wynkyn bubbled out his last breath. Either that or it has been stolen.”
Thomas stopped his pacing, thinking deeply. In the past hour he’d found a solidity of purpose that had before been only a vague hope and yearning. Now he knew exactly what he had to do.
All thought of whores and naked flesh had fled his mind.
“I must retrace Wynkyn de Worde’s last route north,” Thomas said, and Bertrand blinked as if he were a prisoner suddenly and most unexpectedly given his freedom.
He would rid himself of this troublesome brother once and for all!
“I must find that casket,” Thomas said, “but I will need your aid.”
“Ask what you will,” said Bertrand, silently wishing that Thomas would just leave.
“I seek an audience with the pope.”
“What!”
Thomas looked Bertrand in the eye. “Boniface obviously knew something of what Brother Wynkyn did. What if his secret had also been shared with his successors? I must ask the Holy Father, and perhaps even enlist his aid.”
Thomas was prepared to work without it, but the backing of the pope would open many doors for him.
“Sweet Jesu, brother,” Bertrand said, “an audience with Urban? But—”
“Can it be arranged?”
Bertrand played with the frayed end of his belt, trying to purchase some time. Arrange an audience with the pope? Lord Christ Saviour! It could mean the end of his career!
“Brother Prior?”
Bertrand gave up, spreading his hands helplessly. “It will take some time, Brother Thomas, and even then it might prove impossible. Urban has only sat his throne some five days…and some say he may not sit it much longer.”
“What do you mean?” Thomas had spent so much time in prayer the past week that he’d not had the time or inclination to listen to gossip.
“You have not heard? Two days after the election, thirteen of the sixteen cardinals put themselves back on the road to Avignon.”
“Why?”
“When the cardinals met in conclave they were terrified that if they voted in a non-Roman the mob would slaughter them. Well, we all know that for the truth. But there are rumours of more. They say that the cardinals decided to elect Urban as pope on the clear understanding that he would resign within a month or so when the majority of the cardinals were safely back in Avignon. Once safe, the cardinals will declare the Roman conclave void because of interference from the mob and have a new election.”
Thomas fought the urge to swear. The college of cardinals had long had a law that if a papal election came under undue interference then it could be declared null and void.
And Urban’s election had indisputably come under “undue interference”.
This rumour had the smell of truth.
“That evil walks among us cannot be questioned,” Thomas said, “when the cardinals plot such treachery against the Church of Rome!”
“Do you still seek an audience with Urban?”
Thomas nodded. “It will do no harm.”
Bertrand folded his hands in resignation. “I will do what I can.”
Wednesday in Easter Week
In the fifty-first year of the reign of Edward III
(21st April 1378)
—i—
During the seventy years that the popes had resided in Avignon, the papal palace adjoining St Peter’s Basilica had fallen into a state of disrepair. Gregory had not done much to restore it in the year he’d spent in Rome before his death—and many said that that was a clear indication he had not meant to remain permanently in Rome at all—and had only made them habitable.
Thus Urban did not meet petitioners in the great audience hall—half demolished over the past fifty years by Romans seeking foundation stones for their homes—but in a large chapel that ran between St Peter’s and the papal palace. It had taken Prior Bertrand a great deal of time and had caused him to call in a great many favours to engineer a place at the Thursday papal audience for himself and Brother Thomas, and even then he did not know if they would get a chance to actually address the pope.
But this was the best he could do, and so, after their noon meal, he and Brother Thomas made their way into the Leonine City.
The gates in the wall by the Castel St Angelo had been restored to their hangings, but were thrown open to the petitioners and pilgrims wending their way towards St Peter’s. The rising spring meant that the pilgrimage ways were reopening after the winter hiatus, and both Bertrand and Thomas had to push their way through the crowds thronging the streets leading to the Basilica.
Their robes granted them no favours. Rome was stacked to the rafters with clerics of all shapes, sizes and degrees, and a pair of Dominican friars were inconsequential compared to the hordes of bishops and archbishops, holy hermits, frenzied prophets of doom and wild-eyed nuns in the grip of some holy possession.
Thomas’ mouth thinned as he shouldered a way through for himself and the prior. Most of these hermits, prophets and hysterical nuns were but pretenders, their palms held open for coin, their voices shrieking that doom awaited if pilgrims weren’t prepared to part with their last groat for a blessing.
“Does the pope not issue orders to rid the streets of such as these?” he muttered as he and Bertrand were momentarily pinned against a brick wall by the pressing throng.
“Rome has always been cursed with such petitioners,” Bertrand replied. “Sometimes worse. When Boniface called the great Jubilee several years before he died, Rome was awash with over a million pilgrims…as with all the charlatans, whores, relic merchants and money lenders the pilgrim trade attracts.”
Thomas stared at Bertrand, forgetting for the moment the crowds about them. “A million pilgrims? Surely not!”
“’Tis true, my son. Some say the number was even greater.”
Thomas shook his head, unable to conceive of a million people. Rome’s population was normally about thirty thousand—and that was extraordinary enough in Christendom, where few towns had more than two thousand people. But a million?
“Jesu,” he whispered, “how was Rome not destroyed amid such a conflagration of people?”
“Rome has survived many things, Thomas. The corruption and madness of Roman emperors, invasions by barbarians and infidels, and the devilish machinations of kings. A squash of pilgrims would not worry it overmuch.”
But such a crowd, thought Thomas, and the sin it must have engendered.
“Come!” Bertrand said, seizing Thomas’ sleeve.