THE CHAPLAIN OF THE TOWER
“My son!”
The kneeling figure started slightly, hearing the whisper in its ear, and half turned its face.
“Domine salvum fac Regem nostrum Ricardum, my son.”
The Benedictine had stolen list-footed from among the shadows of the great pillars, and stood, a blacker shadow, bending over the solitary worshipper in the darkening chapel of St. John. It was a breathless August evening of the year 1483, and not a sound penetrated to this remote fastness of the Keep.
“God save the King, Father!” answered the suppliant. It was Brackenbury himself, Lieutenant of the Tower, and a sore matter of conscience had brought him to this place. He rose instantly to his feet.
“I say it with all my heart,” quoth he. “God save the King—from numbering himself among his worst enemies.”
“Sh—sh!” whispered the chaplain. “Sh—sh! good Sir John.” He put a finger to his lips, and, motioning the other forth, held him on the outer threshold.
“To ensure the pure succession,” he said low. “This bastard boy, Sir John—a canker that would eat into the State. No safety but in his excision.”
“For the second time,” replied the knight sternly, “take my answer. Question, if you will, the blood that courses in his veins; question not mine. That stoops to no midnight butchery.”
He waved his hand, as if in appeal or protest, towards the chapel, and turned to go. But the priest detained him.
“A moment, good Sir John. The King wills it.”
“He must find a baser instrument.”
“Well so,” said the Benedictine, “well so, good Sir John. Only keep your back to us, saving your honour, and see nothing for a little space.”
The Lieutenant, without another word, strode away, his harness clanging in the vaults.
The covert priest stood listening, a smile, small and hungry, on his lips. He hungered, indeed, had always hungered, for many things—preferment, power, the good immoral gifts of life and indulgences other than Papal. And suddenly, amazingly, it appeared, they were all come within his grasp. He had only to persuade this master of his to a certain deed, by absolving him for it before committed, and a mitre awaited him. It had been whispered in his ear, as he had whispered in Sir John’s. The abbot of his own Order at Westminster was deeply involved with the Queen-Dowager, to whom he had given sanctuary. The crooked King disliked people who sheltered his enemies. A motion of his hand and the chaplain was in the abbot’s place. The seat awaited him—it was stupendous, actual—and, while reaching for it, to be baulked by a scruple of conscience not his own! The thing was intolerable.
Abbot of St. Peter’s! His lips watered, thinking of it; his eyelids blinked and reddened. He was a lean, famished-looking body, with sharp-set features, and a smile perpetually on his mouth between propitiatory and craving. One might have counted his ribs, and never guessed at the dreams of surfeit that wantoned under them. He turned and crept away.
That night a messenger rode from the Tower, following in the wake of the royal progress northwards. He found the King where he lay at Warwick Castle, and, entering to him at midnight, whispered of Sir John’s obstinate density and of the chaplain’s better understanding. A few minutes later Sir James Tyrrell, Master of the King’s Horse, started on his way back to London. He took with him a brace of confidants, fat trusty fellows, whose names should be pilloried throughout the ages. They were John Dighton and Miles Forrest, sinewy miscreants, as callous to suffering as Smithfield butchers. He took also a royal warrant, entrusting to him, for one night only, the custody of the fortress, its keys and passwords; and finally he took, for his personal comfort in the business, a sure conviction of his own damnation. Reaching the Tower, he displayed his commission, locked away all troublesome witnesses, emptied the outer ward, to which the public had access, of its loiterers, and had the place to himself. Having done which, he hastened with his two ruffians to the gate-house where the princes lay.
It was a close, windless night, with thunder brooding over the river. Every stone that slipped under the assassin’s feet jarred his nerves intolerably. He muttered to himself as he walked, wringing his wet forehead. The shadow of a figure that rose upon him from the shadowy porch brought an oath from his lips.
“Who’s that? Answer, and be damned!”
“Hist, good Sir James!” whispered the crawling priest. “Curse not thine own absolver.”
“A blasphemy,” answered Tyrrell; “or God Himself is a villain. Come,” he said intolerantly: “show us the way to hell.”
The Benedictine crossed himself.
“Ostende nobis, Domine, misericordium tuam,” he murmured. “Direct our stumbling feet who seek the light by dubious ways. Give me the key, soldier. It were well that I ascended first to report if the children sleep. The better for them, the better for us.”
Bending under a low doorway in the wall of the passage, he disappeared. Tyrrell let out a quaking groan.
“Trip his heels, trip his heels, O, devil my master!” he sighed between his teeth.
The shadow went up the stairs, paused at a certain door, fitted a key into its lock with stealthy caution, listened, and glided into the room beyond. It was small, and fast locked in stone ten feet in thickness. There were windows front and back. Through the former a cresset burning on St. Thomas’s Tower across the ward cast a red flicker upon a couple of pallets standing near side by side against the wall. A sound of unconscious breathing came from these. The evil shadow crept on and stooped.
Blood on the young white face! Fool! it was the painting of the cresset. This deed might seem a pitiful thing were it not for the hunger that seemed a pitifuller. To be abbot—to be bishop—to be cardinal even! Who knew? He glanced down. His own inky cassock was smeared with the scarlet fire. To wade through blood to the Sacred College! Why not? The end expiated all means thereto. There were a score of precedents to justify him. The Abbacy once gained, his power for good would be multiplied a hundredfold. He raised his eyes. The red glare seemed to fill them from within. Something in his interposing shadow appeared to make the younger child behind him uneasy. He stirred and moaned in his sleep. Presently he murmured, with a whimper:
“Take it away, mother!”
He was always her Saxon darling, with the head of gold. She used to call his eyes like cockles in the corn. The shadow stole apart, and, with a sigh, he breathed warm again.
To be abbot! What surer justification of his right than to dispatch these innocent souls to God? They would thank him in the end for much peril spared them. He hesitated no longer, but, leaving the door ajar, descended as he had come.
The human dogs below were straining in their leashes. At a sign Tyrrell motioned them to their work. The two stole up, while their master remained to hold the door. And then came the awful interval.
The blood on the white face! The priest blinked at the cresset flaming high across the yard. Surely it burned with a lurider glow? It was the wind fanning it. Wind? there was no breath of wind in all the dead night. What, then, if not the pipe of wind in passage or keyhole, was that sudden whine which rose upon the silence? With the sweat breaking out on his forehead, he seized a mattock, one of several which had been laid ready, and began frenziedly striking at the ground under the wall. Tyrrell, with a gasping oath, came hurrying to join him.
They dug like madmen, against their own terror and the vision to come. And when at last it announced itself with heave, and shuffle, and the grunting of brute lungs, they would not pause for a moment, but, reinforced, wrought and wrought until the grave was made, and closed in, and their sin covered. And then Tyrrell, summoning his vile grooms, delivered up his trust and rode away for York, with his soul rattling like a dried kernel within him.
The chaplain thought of a prayer for the dead, and bending, with an abject face, to kneel by the grave, saw dark stains on his sandalled feet. He glanced at the burning cresset, stooped and, touching them, looked at his fingers. To wade through blood! With a shudder he thrust his hands out of sight into the wide sleeves of his cassock, and went hurriedly away, drifting across the open ward like the black shadow of a cloud.
But the morning found him restored and unrepentant.
Abbot of St. Peter’s! Day by day, while that preferment was delayed, the hunger ravened in him and the conscience hardened, until his crime, going unrewarded, filled him with an insane and rageful joy. But one evening there came a secret message to him that the King, superstitious after the fashion of the sceptical and world-serving, had taken exception to the place of burial, and desired that the dead should be privately exhumed and reinterred in a place less unconsecrate. Flushed with renewed hope, then, he hugged his confidence, and went with burning eyes about his task.
God knows how he managed to perform it, and alone, and without exciting suspicion. He was lord of his own sacred domain. But, working with demoniac energy, he got out the spoiled young bodies, and conveyed them one by one to the new grave he had himself opened for them under the chapel stairs. There they might repose within sound of the Mass, at peace and at rest for evermore. His imagination, as with monomaniacs, could flow only in one direction. Each day he trod upon the stones that hid his secret, and never faltered or feared. And each day he waited, hungering, for his summons to Westminster.
It came at last—the prize for which he had wrought, and suffered, and bartered his priestly soul. He was in the chapel at the time, and he heard the voice of the Lieutenant calling to him. He hurried out, and saw Sir John standing, citation in hand, at the foot of the stairs.
“Hail, Father Abbot!” quoth the knight, in that derisory tone he had ever assumed towards him since their last interview.
The chaplain, his thin lips chewing out a smile, lingered on the top of the flight. And then, all in a moment, his eyes were seen to fix themselves in a stare of horror, as if some terrific vision opposed them.
“What’s this?” he whispered. “Who put it here?”
The other answered, startled: “I see naught.”
“Ah-ha!”
He threw up his hands with a screech and fell headlong. His neck, as he pitched, doubled under him with a crack, and the body, bowling down, was flung at Sir John’s feet. There, with its head fallen back upon the very stone which locked away its secret, it relaxed and settled.
He had received the wages and paid the price of blood in one and the same instant.
So died that chaplain of the Tower who alone, out of all the kingdom, could have solved the mystery of the tragic dead. When, on the accession of Henry, it became necessary, for reasons of high policy, to disinter the bodies, the grave under the wall was found to have been violated—only rumour could whisper by whom. One of the actual murderers was dead; the other, together with the late Master of the Horse, being seized and questioned, could throw no light upon the matter. Not until two hundred years had passed was the secret to be unearthed by some masons engaged in repairing the chapel stairs.
And the priest? There was a legend once current of an odd little detail connected with his end. And that was that the body, when picked up, exhibited no marks of injury about the head and neck, only the feet were bloody. It might well have been, seeing whereon they had trodden those many days past.