The Abbot's Agreement Read Online Free PDF Page B

tried to ignore Arthur’s rattling and wheezing, and thought of a bloodless corpse from which water drained rather than gore. I finally fell to sleep with the issue unresolved.
    Some time in the night I awoke. The fire had burned down to just a few glowing embers. The blanket provided was too thin to ward off the November chill. And Arthur was snoring as loudly as a novice musician tootling upon a sackbut. A possible answer to the riddle of John Whytyng’s death came to me there in the darkened chamber, and I lay for the remainder of the night impatient for the dawn to try my speculation and see if I might find evidence that it was so.

I am accustomed to waking in our chamber at Galen House to Father Thomas de Bowlegh’s clerk ringing the Angelus Bell in the tower of the Church of St. Beornwald. So when the sacrist rang Eynsham Abbey’s great bell for lauds I was not much startled. Indeed, I welcomed the deep, thunderous peal, for it meant that the notion which had come to me in the night could soon be investigated in the light of day.
    Monks do not break their fast, but ’tis common for abbey guests to be offered a loaf. A short time after the monks were called from their beds an elderly lay brother appeared with two loaves and a ewer of ale. Arthur and I consumed the meal – the ale was quite foul – and waited for the misty dawn to become day. While we ate I told him of my supposition, and he nodded understanding while munching upon his loaf.
    A day of sunshine in November is a rare thing, and as the sun appeared it seemed that Eynsham would enjoy its fifth in succession. Perhaps the Lord Christ smiled upon my endeavor and wished to provide the illumination necessary for success.
    “You think the lad maybe drowned in a fishpond, an’ got stabbed after somebody fished ’im out, eh?” Arthur reviewed what I had explained to him between his last bites of maslin loaf.
    “This might explain the lack of blood upon his slashed habit. If he drowned, he would not have bled much, as dead men do not do so. If he was first stabbed, then fell into the fishpond, blood from his wounds would have been washed away, and he might yet have been alive when he went into the water, so that his lungs filled as he died.”
    “But why’d the water come from ’is mouth?”
    “Dead men soon begin to bloat, as decay sets upon them. This happens soonest when ’tis warm, but even in cool November putrefaction will soon begin. A corpse begins to swell from the rot within.”
    “But how’d that cause the lad to leak so?”
    “The bloating put pressure upon his lungs, and forced water there out through his throat.”
    “Ah… so what do you think,” Arthur said thoughtfully, “drowned first, then stabbed, or other way ’round?”
    “Stabbed first, I think, and he would surely have died of his wounds had he not fallen or been cast into a fishpond.”
    “Mayhap he went into the water to escape the man who attacked ’im,” Arthur said.
    “That also,” I agreed.
    There are two fishponds at Eynsham Abbey, one to the west, the other to the east of abbey precincts. Monks, or more likely lay brothers and abbey villeins, had created these a century past by diverting the flow of a small brook. The ponds are not large, but the abbey is a small house so there are few monks to feed.
    Since it was closest to the guest house, we circled the west pond first. I sought some sign of struggle; broken reeds, perhaps, or footprints in the mud where earth and water meet, where no man would be likely to tread. I found nothing.
    The east pond is past the monks’ dormitory and near to where the brook now flows. Beyond the brook is a wood, which extends to the south and west as far as the place where birds discovered John Whytyng’s corpse.
    It was on the far side of the east pond, where bare oak and beech limbs cast interlacing shadows to the edge of the pond, that I saw the broken reeds. As I saw them I heard Arthur say, “When did it last