THE DUNGEON.
It was just before sunset of the disastrous day which saw the
traitorous monks of Ely return from the castle at Cam-Bridge, that the
Lord of Brunn and his trusty sword-bearer arrived at Turbutsey[240]
(where the monks of old had landed the body of Saint Withburga) with
the corn and wine for the abbey; and also with the dead body of the
Salernitan, which they hoped to inter in the abbey church-yard.
Turbutsey had but few in-dwellers; and the poor hinds that were there
had heard nothing of the foul report of Lord Hereward’s death, which
had wrought such mischief in the abbey. Lord Hereward, eager to be at
his proper post in the Camp of Refuge, took the direct road, or path,
which led thereunto, carrying with him, for the comfort of secular
stomachs, only a few flagons of wine and a few measures of wheat, and
ordering Elfric to go up to the abbey with all the rest of the
provision, as soon as it should be all landed from the boats and
skerries. But, before the landing was finished, there came down some
gossips from the township of Ely, who reported with marvellous sad
faces, that the gates of the abbey had been closed ever since the
mid-day of yesterday; and that the whole house was as silent and sad as
a pest-house, on account, no doubt, of the death of the good Lord of
Brunn, the kind-hearted, open-handed lord, who had ever befriended the
Saxon poor! Upon hearing them talk in this fashion, the sword bearer
came up to the gossips, and told them that the Lord of Brunn was no
more dead than he was.
“Verily,” said the people, “the sad news came down to the township
yesterday before the hour of noon; and ever since then the abbey gates
and church gates have been closed, and the township hath been in tears.”
Now, upon hearing this strange news, Elfric’s quick fancy began to
work, and apprehending some evil, albeit he knew not what, he resolved
not to carry up the stores, but to go up alone by himself to see what
strange thing had happened in the abbey, that should have caused the
monks to bar their doors, and even the doors of the church, against the
faithful. He thought not of the want of rest for one night, or of the
toils he had borne on that night and during two whole days, for he had
borne as much before without any great discomfort; but he looked at the
stark body of the Salernitan, as it lay with the face covered in one of
the boats, and then he thought of Girolamo’s death-wound and dying
moment, and of the ill-will which some of the convent had testified
towards that stranger, and of the rumours he had heard of murmurings
and caballings against the good Lord Abbat, and he said to himself, “My
heart is heavy, or heavier than it ever was before, and my mind is
haunted by misgivings. If the monks of Ely be traitors to their
country, and rebels to their abbat, by all the blessed saints of the
house of Ely they shall not taste of this bread, nor drink of this
wine! And then this unburied, uncoffined, unanealed[241] body, and the
dying prayer of Girolamo for Christian burial, and a grave whither the
Normans should come not!... I must see to that, and provide against
chances.” And having thus said to himself, he said aloud to his troop
of fenners: “Unload no more corn and wine, but stay ye here at
Turbutsey until ye see me back again; but if I come not back by
midnight, or if any evil report should reach ye before then, cross the
river, and carry all the corn and the wine with ye deep into the fens;
and carry also with ye this the dead body of Girolamo, unto whom I
bound myself to see it interred in some safe and consecrate place; and
go by the straightest path towards Spalding! Do all this if ye love me
and reverence the Lord of Brunn; and in the meanwhile rejoice your
hearts with some of the good drink: only be wise and moderate.” And the
fenners said that they would do it all, and would be moderate: and
thereupon, leaving behind him the Ely gossips, and the fenners, the
corn, the wine, and the dead body of Girolamo, Elfric took the road to
the abbey, and arrived _ad magnam portam_, at the main-gate, before it
was quite dark. A few of the town folk had followed him to the gate,
shouting with all their main that Elfric the lucky sword-bearer had
come back, that the Lord of Brunn had come back, and that they had
brought good store of corn, meal, and wine for my Lord Abbat Thurstan:
for, upon reflection, Elfric had thought it wise to tell them this
much. But from within the abbey Elfric heard no sound, nor did he see
the form or face of man, in the turret over the gate-way, or in the
windows, or on the house-top. But there were those or the watch within
who saw Elfric very clearly, and who heard the noise the town-folk were
making: and anon the small wicket-gate was opened, and Elfric was bade
enter; and the poor folk were commanded to go home, and cease making
that outcry. Once, if not twice, Elfric thought of withdrawing with the
Ely folk, and then of racing back to Turbutsey; for he liked not the
aspect of things: but it was needful that he should have a clear notion
of what was toward in the abbey, and so blaming himself, if not for his
suspicions, for his own personal apprehensions, he stepped through the
wicket, taking care to shout, at the top of his voice, as he got under
the echoing archway, “Good news! brave news! The Lord Hereward is come
back to the camp, and hath brought much corn and wine for this hallowed
house! Lead me to Abbat Thurstan—I must speak with the Lord Abbat
forthwith!
“Thou mayst speak with him in the bottomless pit,” said the sub-prior.
And as the sub-prior spoke, under the dark archway within the gate, a
half-score from among the traitorous monks leaped upon the faithful
sword-bearer, and put a gag into his mouth, so that he could cry out no
more, and whirled him across the court-yards, and through the
cloisters, and down the steep wet staircase, and into the cell or
vault, or living grave, within and under the deep foundations of the
abbey: and there, in the bowels of the earth, and in utter solitude and
utter darkness, and with three several iron-bound doors closed upon
him, they left him, making great haste to return to the refectory, and
hoping that their plan had been so well managed that none but the
desperate members of their own faction had either seen Elfric enter, or
heard his shouts, or the shouts of the town-folk.
So soon as Elfric could get the gag out of his mouth, and recover from
his first astonishment, he began to think; and he thought that this was
but a bad return for his fighting and risking death for the sake of the
stomachs and bowels of the monks of Ely; and he became convinced in his
own mind that the traitorous monks must have made away with the noble
Abbat Thurstan, and have consummated their treachery: and then he
thought of his friends in the Camp of Refuge, and at Hadenham, and of
the Lord Hereward and the Ladie Alftrude, and, most of all, of the maid
Mildred! And then there came before him the ghastly face of the
Salernitan, and rang in his ears, like a knell, the words which the
dying Girolamo had used in the morning, when speaking of the hard doom
of his beloved! And, next to this, he bethought himself of the fearful
legend of the house of Ely, which related how the blinded prince, who
had pined so long in those dreary vaults, had ever since haunted them
under the most frightful forms! Yet when his lively fancy had brought
all these things before him, and even when he had become convinced that
he would be buried alive, or left to starve and gnaw the flesh from his
own bones in that truly hellish pit, which he knew was as dark by day
as by night, a sudden and sweet calm came over his distraught mind; and
he kneeled on the cold slimy floor of the dungeon and raised to heaven
his hands, which he could not see himself, but which were well seen by
the saints above, unto whom thick darkness is as bright light; and when
he had said a short prayer for himself and for his Mildred, for his
generous lord and most bountiful ladie, he threw himself along the
ground, and laying his left arm under his head for a pillow, he made
himself up for sleep. “Come what will,” said he, “I have been true to
my God, to my saints, to my country, to my church, to my lord and
master, and to my love! This martyrdom will soon be over! Not these
deep hollows of the earth, nor all the weight of all the walls and
arched roofs and springing towers of Ely Abbey can crush or confine, or
keep down, the immortal spirit of man! Mildred! my Lord Hereward! my
noble lady and mistress! and thou, oh joyous and Saxon-hearted Lord
Abbat Thurstan! if traitors have it their own way here, we meet in
heaven, where there be no Normans and no Saxon traitors!” And so
saying, or thinking, and being worn out by excess of fatigue, or rather
by the excessiveness of his late short moral anguish,—an agony sharper
than that of the rack, upon which men are said to have fallen
asleep,—Elfric in a very few moments fell into the soundest of all
sleeps. The toads, which fatten in darkness, among the noxious and
colourless weeds which grow where light is not, and the earth-worms
crawled over and over him, but without awakening him, or giving him any
disturbance in his deep sleep. And as he slept, that black and horrent
dungeon, in which his body lay, was changed, by the bright visions
which blessed his sleep, into scenes as bright as the chapel of Saint
Etheldreda in the abbey church, on the great day of the saint’s
festival, when a thousand waxen tapers are burning, and the whole air
is loaded with incense and with music. It was the sunshine of a good
conscience shining inwardly.
Now, while it fared thus with the captive below, much talk and
discussion took place among divers of the honest monks above; for,
notwithstanding the great care which had been taken to send away the
Ely folk, and to seize and gag Elfric as soon as he came within the
gate, the cry of the men of Ely, and the shout of the sword-bearer that
Lord Hereward had come back, and had brought much corn and wine, were
heard in almost every part of the house; and, upon hearing them, the
monks that were not of the faction grievously lamented what had been
done against the Lord Abbat, and in favour of the Normans, and very
clearly perceived that a trick had been put upon them in the report of
Lord Hereward’s death.
“I tell ye now, as I told ye then,” said Father Kynric, “that ye all
make too much account of your meat and drink, and are all too impatient
of temporary inconvenience. But what said the blessed Etheldreda? ‘The
fashion of this world passeth away; and that only is to be accounted
life which is purchased by submitting to temporal inconveniences.’”
“And tell me,” said that other good old Saxon monk, the Father Celred;
“tell me, oh my brethren, tell me how Saint Etheldreda fared when she
was in the flesh, and ruled this house as lady abbess?”
“Aye,” said good Father Elsin, “Saint Etheldreda never wore linen, but
only woollen; she never returned to her bed after matins, which were
then begun immediately after midnight; and, except on the great
festivals of the church, she ate only once a day, nor cared nor knew
whether her bread was white or brown.”
“Alack!” said Kenulph of Swaffham, a cloister-monk who had voted for
the wicked prior solely because the cellars and the granaries were
empty; “alack! man’s flesh is weak, and hunger is so strong! Saint
Etheldreda was a woman, and a delicate princess; but, an she had been
an upland man like me, and with such a sharp Saxon stomach as I have,
she never could have lived upon one meal a day!”
“That is to say,” quoth Father Cranewys, “if she had not been sustained
by permanent and wondrous miracle, for ye wis, Brother Kenulph, that
there be ladie saints in hagiology that have lived for octaves, and for
whole moons together, upon nothing but the scent of a rose. I wonder,
and would fain know, how much corn and wine the Lord of Brunn hath
brought with him.”
“Whatever he hath brought,” quoth Father Kynric, “the Normans will get
it all! the prior and the sub-prior, and all the rest of the officials
speak in riddles, but none of us can be so dull as not to see that Duke
William will be here to-night or to-morrow morning, and that the prior
went to invite him hither. The mischief is now done, and the prior is
too strong to be resisted; but if there were but three cloister-monks
of my mind, I would break out of this house in spite of the sub-prior’s
calls, and locks, and bars! Yea, I would break out and release the
brave boy Elfric, and away with him to the Camp of Refuge, to put my
Lord Hereward and our other noble friends, and the whole Saxon host
upon their guard. Everlasting infamy will rest upon the monks of Ely,
if they be taken and massacred in their sleep.”
“If,” said the monk from Swaffham, “the supplies which the Lord
Hereward hath brought be abundant, I would rather go and pass this
autumn and coming winter in the fens, than stay here under the usurped
rule of the prior, who beareth a mortal hatred against all of us that
ever opposed him. Nay, I would rather continue to eat meat and fish
without bread (provided only there was a little wine), than abide here
to witness so foul a treason as thou talkest of. But prithee, brother
Kynric, how much corn and wine may a man reasonably expect to have been
brought down, and where is it?”
Kynric responded, that he only knew that the Ely folk had cried, that
there was good store of corn, meal, and wine, and that Elfric had
shouted within the gate that there was much corn and wine.
Father Elsin said that he had heard the cellarer say to the
sub-sacrist, that the good store of provision would be at Turbutsey,
inasmuch as Hereward had promised to land it there; and that at a very
early hour in the morning it should all be sent for and brought into
the abbey.
“In that case,” quoth the upland monk, “If a few of us could sally out
before midnight, the corn and wine might be ours.”
“Of a surety,” said Father Kynric, “and we might carry it with us into
the fens, which will not be conquered though the Camp of Refuge should
fall; and we might share it with Lord Hereward and his true Saxons, and
look to time and chance, and the bounty of the saints, for fresh
supplies.”
“Then by all the saints that lie entombed in Ely,” said Kenulph of
Swaffham, “I will break out and quit this dishonoured and dishallowed
community! The porter at the great gate came like me from Swaffham; Tom
of Tottington, the lay-brother that waits upon the sub-prior, the
holder of the keys, was brought into this house by me: there be other
lay brothers and servientes that would do my will or thy will, oh
Kynric, or thine, Elsin, or thine, Celred, sooner than the will of the
prior, and the rather since they have heard of the corn and wine!
Assuredly they will unbar doors and break out with us when they are
told that the store is so near at hand as at Turbutsey!”
“An we could but carry off with us our true Lord Abbat Thurstan,” said
Father Kynric, “it were a glorious deed.”
“But it cannot be,” quoth Kenulph, “for the infirmarer told me anon
that Thurstan is sick almost to death; and then he is watched and
guarded by all the keenest of the faction, and the faction is too
numerous and strong to allow us to proceed by force, or to attempt
anything save by stratagem and in secrecy. But, silence! we are
watched, and that fox, the sub-sacrist, is getting within ear-shot. So
let us separate, and let each of us, before going into the dormitory,
and into his cell, speak with such of the house as he can with entire
faith depend upon. I will go unto the gate-keeper.”
It was the custom of the monks to walk and talk in the cloisters for a
space between supper and bed time; and the above discourses were made
in the quietest corner of the cloisters a very short time before the
second watch of the night. Those who had made them separated, and very
soon after they all withdrew to the dormitory; and the sub-prior, as
was the bounden duty of his office, went through the dormitory and
knocked at every cell-door, and called upon every monk by name, and
heard and saw that each monk and each novice was in his cell for the
night. And when the sub-prior had thus fulfilled what was _in statutis
ordinis_, he went to his own chamber, which was in the turret over the
great gateway; and being weary, he went straight to his bed, first
putting under his pillow the key of the gate, and the keys of the foul
dungeon into which Elfric had been whirled. The prior, the chamberlain,
the cellarer, and other chiefs of the faction, sate up awhile in secret
conference in the prior’s own private chamber; but then they too
separated and went to their beds, comforting themselves with the
prospect of the abundance which should henceforward reign in the house,
and of the honours and advantages they should severally receive on the
morrow from Duke William for their dark treason to their countrymen.
Being all worn out with fatigue, they were soon fast asleep, each
having proposed to himself to rise at a very early hour in the morning,
in order to get in Lord Hereward’s supplies, and to see to the proper
decorating of the church for the reception of Duke William, and his
brother the fighting bishop, and the rest of the Norman crew. Above and
below, the whole abbey of Ely was asleep when the good fathers Kynric,
Elsin, Celred, Cranewys, and Kenulph, with two other cloister-monks who
had determined to flee from the house, came one by one in perfect
silence, and carrying their shoes and sandals in their hands, forth
from the dormitory, and into the quadrangle of the abbey, and then
under the low arched way, where the gatekeeper, that free layman from
Swaffham, was standing ready to unbar the gate, and where the
lay-brother that waited upon the sub-prior was waiting for his order to
begin. A word from Father Kenulph in his ear, and away went the
sub-prior’s man up into the chamber over the gateway. And before one
might say three credos, the lay-brother was back again under the
archway, with the four ponderous keys in his hand. Then they all went
into the gatekeeper’s room, where two cressets were burning brightly;
and by that light the cloister monks saw that there was blood upon the
heaviest of the keys.
“Tom of Tottington,” said Kenulph, “what is this? What is it thou hast
done?”
“Nothing;” said the serviens, “but only this: the sub-prior woke from
his sleep as I drew the keys from under his pillow, and was going to
cry out and alarm the house, and so I brained him. He was ever hard
master unto me.”
“Well!” quoth Kenulph, “’tis better that the sub-prior perish in his
sins and unconfessed, than that we fail in our enterprise, and leave
our friends in the Camp to be taken unawares. So, Tom of Tottington,
hurry thee down to the prison and bring up Elfric.”
The churl from Tottington grew quite pale, and said, “I dare not do it!
I am no cloister-monk or mass-priest, and have no Latin whereby to lay
spirits! I cannot adventure into the bowels of the earth to face the
restless ghost of the blind prince.... I cannot go alone!”
“Well!” quoth Kenulph, who first crossed himself, “I will go with thee;
so bear the keys, and I will carry the light, and say the prayer _Ab
hoste maligno libera nos, Domine_, as we go.”
The sword-bearer was still sleeping happily when the monk and the
lay-brother came into the dark vault with the bright shining cresset;
but as the light fell upon his eyelids he awoke, and saw Father Kenulph
standing over him; and then he started up and said, “I have been
dreaming a true dream; for when did Father Kenulph do aught but good to
honest man and true Saxon! Ah! Tom of Tottington, art thou here too?
Then shall I not be buried alive or starved to death!”
“Elfric,” said Kenulph, “thou art safe and free, so rise and follow us.
But tell me, good Elfric, what supply didst bring to Turbutsey?”
“We loaded with corn and with wine a score of upland pack-horses, and
many more than a score of strong asses,” said the sword-bearer.
“’Tis well,” quoth Kenulph, licking his lips and rubbing his hands,
“’tis better than well! So follow me, and when thou comest to the upper
regions make no noise, for the Lord Abbat Thurstan is deposed from his
authority and is sick unto death; the abbey is in the hands of the
prior and his crew; and we and a few more honest members of the house
are flying from it to get the stores at Turbutsey, and to give warning
to the Lord of Brunn, that the false monks of Ely have sold and
betrayed him.”
“I thought as much as all this,” quoth the sword-bearer; and without
asking any questions, he followed the cloister-monk and the lay-brother
to the gatekeeper’s chamber, praising and blessing the saints for this
his so speedy deliverance. As he entered the room, reverentially
saluting the other cloister-monks, the porter gave him his sword, which
had been snatched from him upon his being first seized under the
gateway. Next the stout porter took down some swords and spears, and
fen-poles, that hung in his room, and armed his friends and himself
with them; and then, in less than a Credo, the whole party got out of
the monastery through the wicket-gate, and, first closing and fastening
the wicket on the outside, they all took the broad high road that leads
to Turbutsey. Six good cloister-monks, and ten good lay-brothers and
servientes, were there in this company; but all the rest of the convent
remained behind to await the slaughter of their countrymen in the Camp,
to welcome the Normans to Ely, and to get from them—that which they
deserved. Elfric and Tom of Tottington (an expert fenner, and much
fitter to be a soldier than the waiting-man of a monk) presently
quitted the road to take a rough path across the fens which led
directly into the Camp: the rest hastened on to Turbutsey, and as they
arrived there before the midnight, they were in good time to aid the
true men Elfric had left there in getting the good stores across the
river and well into the fens. Some of the party would have left the
body of Girolamo behind at Turbutsey, or would have thrown it into the
river; but the people said what Elfric had said to them concerning the
dead body, and the fighting men who had fought the Normans near
Brandon, and who had seen with their own eyes the Christian end the
Salernitan had made, all declared that Girolamo must have Christian
burial in some consecrated place where the Normans could not disturb
his ashes.