“Lady Helena, what are you doing?! Put him down!” Clara shouted without stopping to think.
“If you say so, Clara.”
Helena swung her arm down, and Father Anchieta dropped like a rock, hitting the floorboards hard enough to rattle the furniture.
Clara flinched. “Goddess, that’s not—” She rushed over and knelt next to him as he coughed. “Father, can you hear me?”
She tried to slide her hand under his shoulder, but he didn’t budge. She pulled harder—surely she wasn’t so weak that she couldn’t even help a man sit up—but no matter what she did, Anchieta’s body stayed pinned to the floor. It was as if she were trying to lift a car.
Clara looked up.
Helena stood over them.
“Helena. Stop it. Right now. You have to let him go.”
“I can’t do that. He killed Mother Radegund. He had money to lose, he has a silver key, and now he’s violated her room. Isn’t it obvious?”
Why does she have to be so damn perceptive?!
“We don’t know for sure if it was him.” Clara said it as steadily as she could manage. “Yes, I agree that he’s suspicious, but that’s not proof. You remember Dame Rowena’s trial—everyone thought she was guilty at first, right? Only Prince Ciarán believed in her innocence, and he was right. You need to look at things thoroughly before you decide something like that.”
Helena pursed her lips. “I understand.”
The pressure faded. Under Clara’s hands, Anchieta’s shoulder finally gave, and he gasped and curled onto his side, sucking in air in ragged breaths.
Helena crouched down beside him, her face melting back into its usual earnestness. “Father, are you alright?”
Clara scanned the room and spotted a glass pitcher and a cup on the shelf near the bed. She poured water into the cup and pressed it into Anchieta’s shaking hands. He drank all of it in one go, his eyes never once leaving Helena.
Once Clara was reasonably sure the priest wasn’t about to die, she turned to Helena. “Lady Helena. You can’t do that. You can’t attack someone just because you think they’re guilty. What if he’s not? What if you ended up killing an innocent man?”
“But I wasn’t going to kill him.” Helena looked genuinely puzzled. “I was just going to make him confess.”
“That’s—” Clara stopped herself and exhaled. She’s a teenager. A disturbingly powerful teenager with an upside-down moral compass, but still a teenage girl. Probably. “How did you even do that? You don’t have a wand, you’re not wearing a ring, and I didn’t hear any chant, so how did you use magic?”
Helena looked down at her own hand, flexing her fingers. “You know, I’m not really sure, honestly. I wanted him to stop moving, and then he did. I just did what felt right. Mmm.” She thought for a moment, then smiled. “The Goddess must have been watching!”
Clara gulped, sincerely hoping the Goddess knew better than to leave the delicate art of criminal sentencing in the hands of children, and that the Church would teach Helena to wield her power responsibly. When this is done, I need to tell someone about her attitude. Maybe I’ll write to the Pope.
She turned back to Anchieta and noted that his face had regained its usual color. Most of it. “Father, I think you’d better explain yourself, if you feel well enough to talk. Why did you come to Mother Radegund’s room?”
“I—” The word came out as a rasp, and he cleared his throat twice before continuing. “The money, Dame Casewell. That’s all it was. I… I still owe money from my wager with the duchess back at the Esperança, and then there was the card game with Lord Conrad… The seat stake was how I meant to make everything back.”
“I don’t understand. I know you bet that Mother Cornelia would be in the front row instead of Mother Radegund, but what does that have to do with coming here? It’s not like Radegund will get the seat anymore. Doesn’t that increase your chances of winning the bet?”
“Nobody will win anything.” He chuckled once. “Mother Radegund was the bookmaker.”
Clara raised an eyebrow. Somehow, that made perfect sense. Radegund was blind, allegedly mad, senior enough to be mostly untouchable, and prone to ignoring authority. There’d be no one better to run a gambling ring inside the Church, really.
“Now that she’s…” Anchieta faltered, glancing at Helena. “Now that Mother Radegund is with the Goddess, I feared the sisters would find out about her side activities when they came to clear the room, and all the money would be confiscated.” Then his brow furrowed. “Wait. You two think she was murdered? And that I killed her? I thought the Cardinal Primate said it was an accident!”
“We have reason to believe there may be more to her fall,” said Clara. “Did you?”
“Goddess, no! Of course not!” He pressed a hand to his chest. “I swear it on my robes, and on the Esperança’s boilers. I only wanted my money back. That’s all.”
“He’s lying,” said Helena. “If he’s succumbed to greed, then he could fall to other sins. We can’t trust him, Clara.”
Then she raised her hand.
Clara caught the girl’s wrist. “Wait. You don’t need to do this. You’re right that we shouldn’t just take his word for it—we’re investigating, and he is a suspect—but there’s no need to do things so violently. If you think he’s lying, Mont Sainte-Michelle has a much better method of checking.”
Helena considered it. “You mean the Blessing! Yes, it would be perfect for this, wouldn’t it?” She lowered her arm. “Wonderful idea, Clara.”
“I’ll go ask Tobias if he’s willing to help us,” said Clara. “In the meantime, you stay here with Father Anchieta, and you promise me you won’t do anything until I’m back. Actually, let’s make it a pinky promise.”
“What’s a pinky promise?”
Clara held up her smallest finger. “It’s a promise you make with your little finger, like this. You link fingers with the other person, and once you do, you absolutely cannot break the promise. It’s an oath between friends, Helena.”
Helena beamed, curling her finger around Clara’s. “I pinky promise, friend. We’ll wait right here, won’t we, Father?”
Anchieta’s nod was stiff.
Clara ran to the gatehouse where they’d processed her entry. It took ten minutes, and she spent every one of them praying that Helena’s definition of ‘anything’ matched her own. She found the brown-robed inquisitor-in-training standing by the outer gate, overlooking the flooded causeway.
“Dame Casewell? Is something the matter?”
She took a second to catch her breath before answering. “Tobias, I need you to come with me.”
“With you? Where? Why?” he asked.
“Mother Radegund’s room. Sorry, I don’t have time to explain. Please, just come with me. And bring your chalice and some wine.”
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“I can’t just leave my post, Dame Casewell.” Tobias tugged at a strand of his fair hair. “Even with the tide up, the rules say there must always be a representative of the inquisition at the gate, and the custodian isn’t here to—”
“The Saintess-to-be is calling for you. By name.”
The boy’s eyes went wide. He ducked into the gatehouse and came out a second later with a chalice under one arm and a flask under the other.
Maybe I need to ask Helena to come with me to Parliament. That might get me around a lot of red tape.
They rushed back to Mother Radegund’s room, and Clara was relieved to find Father Anchieta alive and sitting at the foot of the bed. Helena was smiling by the door, saying something about the weather. Judging by the priest’s helpless stare, the conversation might as well have been an executioner describing her favorite axe.
Clara didn’t waste time. “Tobias, we need you to administer the Blessing of Truth to Father Anchieta.”
Tobias hesitated. “The Blessing? I, I’m only an inquisitor-in-training… I shouldn’t do that without supervision.”
“Please, Tobias.” Helena looked pleadingly at him, clasping her hands together. “I’ll watch over you, and I can take responsibility for whatever happens. This is really important to me, and you’re the only one who can help.”
His cheeks flushed. “I suppose there’s no better oversight than that of a Saintess-to-be.” He put the chalice on Mother Radegund’s writing desk and filled it from the flask. “In vino veritas.”
The chalice glowed, and Father Anchieta drank without having to be asked. The soft golden light pulsed from his chest.
“The Blessing has taken hold,” said Clara, mostly because no one else did, and it’d feel wrong without it.
“Father, did you kill Mother Radegund?” Helena asked immediately.
Clara dearly hoped, for his sake, that the answer was no, because if it was yes, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to convince Helena that he deserved a trial and not a summary execution.
“No, I did not.” His shoulders sagged with relief at his own answer.
Helena didn’t react, still smiling exactly as she had before. It didn’t seem like she felt any guilt or need to apologize. “Why did you come to her room?”
“To search for her coin purse. But I didn’t find it,” said Anchieta.
“What were you going to do if you found it?”
“I was going to take all the money.”
Helena frowned.
“No, wait.” He raised his hands in supplication. “I was going to take it all, yes, but only so I could leave the rest somewhere where everyone else could reclaim their own stakes. I only ever planned to keep my part. I needed the coin to pay back—” He stopped, compelled by the Blessing. “I mean, I needed it to bet on the dice night at the tavern on Fleet Street next week.”
“Father.” Helena’s voice carried pure indignation. “A holy man ought to know better than that.”
Well, at least he wasn’t planning on stealing other people’s money. Given how deep the hole he’s dug himself into seems to be, I kind of expected worse.
Father Anchieta scratched the back of his neck sheepishly. “I am sorry, Lady Helena. I… I’ll work on bettering myself.” The golden light pulsed even at that last part.
Clara sank into the nearest chair. Regardless of anything else, she was glad that he wasn’t the murderer; she’d grown fond of him aboard the Esperança and during his classes, and she really didn’t want to deal with another case of friendly-priest-turned-murderer.
Then again, the Blessing isn’t perfect. I should at least make sure he’s not hiding something, since we’ve already gone this far.
“Did you play any part in or contribute in any way to Mother Radegund’s death?” Clara asked.
“No.”
“Do you know anyone who did? Or anything about the circumstances of her death beyond what the Cardinal Primate announced?”
“No, nothing.”
She asked again in a few different ways, rephrasing it each time to prevent any technicalities from slipping through. His answer was always negative.
“I don’t think he had anything to do with it, Lady Helena,” said Clara. And I’m not comfortable forcing him to answer anything else. Putting someone under the Blessing like this, outside of court and with no judge overseeing it, felt like a violation—she’d only suggested it to prevent Helena from doing something worse. “Tobias, please release him.”
Tobias nodded, and the golden light dissipated.
Clara lowered her head. “I apologize for putting you through this, Father.”
Father Anchieta faced her. “It was… Well, I won’t say it was nothing, but if you truly believe Mother Radegund may have been murdered, I understand why Lady Helena is agitated. I shall not hold it against you, Dame Casewell.”
“Thank you.”
“But Clara, if it wasn’t him, then who was it?” asked Helena.
“I don’t know. But there are still other threads to pull—to start with, we can look for others who stood to lose from the wager.”
“About that.” Anchieta reached into his robes and took out a notebook that Clara recognized instantly. “I found this earlier, and I believe it is where Mother Radegund kept her latest accounts. Have a look at it, though I regret to say that you won’t find a motive for murder inside these pages.”
Clara took it.
She’d expected to find chaos within, the barely legible scribbles of someone who hadn’t seen in thirty years. Instead, laid out in calligraphy so elaborate Clara would’ve believed it came from the hand of a lifelong scribe, was a list of names—everyone who had placed a wager. Which, apparently, was most of Mont Sainte-Michelle, plus a bunch of people who weren’t stationed here but had joined in during a visit.
“This is good,” Clara murmured. “If we work through this list, we’ll be able to pinpoint who’d benefit from Radegund’s death.”
It was all very well organized, too. The amounts were clearly marked, together with the odds, and every page was cross-referenced and totaled.
She quickly found the line bearing Anchieta’s name. ‘F. Anchieta. 90m. Cornelia.’ It was underlined twice, and next to it was a margin note that read ‘har har.’
Ninety marks?! And that’s six months of his wages? Clara did the math and frowned. Her entire monthly salary as a lady’s maid had been four marks. Stella, you should’ve been a navy chaplain.
Hold on.
‘S. Beth. 6p. Radegund.’
‘B. Dicton. 1 small wheel of aged cheddar cheese, valued at 20p. Cornelia.’
‘S. Marcia. 10p. Cornelia.’
‘I.T. Tobias. 1 pot of strawberry jam, valued at 8p. Roderick.’
‘G.I. Valentia. 1m. Roderick.’
“I see why you said this notebook didn’t hold a motive for murder, Father,” Clara said. “Everyone else put up pennies or scraps of food!” She glanced at Tobias at that last part, and he averted his eyes. “Even the larger bets are a mark or two, which is already a lot. You really bet ninety?”
“Ah, yes, I suppose I may have gone a bit overboard, now that you mention it,” he answered meekly. “And speaking of my marks, Dame Casewell, Lady Helena… With my innocence so painstakingly established, might I be permitted to continue my search for the purse?”
Oh, Father.
“No.” Helena’s rejection was absolute. “You must take this as a lesson in faith and live with the consequences of your actions, so that you may become closer to the Goddess. That’s what Mother Radegund always said.”
“It was worth a try,” said Anchieta.
That was when the two o’clock bell echoed through the abbey—meaning less than a handful of hours remained until Clara’s departure. Tobias excused himself, going back to the gatehouse to help process entrants now that the tide was about to be lowered, and Father Anchieta left to prepare the reading material to assign her as a substitute for today’s lesson.
Clara took the pitcher and poured herself some water.
Should I even keep investigating, considering what Helena might end up doing if we find the culprit? With the bruise on Mother Radegund’s wrist, I could go tell the Cardinal Primate there’s reason to be suspicious without revealing that I was somewhere I shouldn’t have been, and let the Church handle it.
Bowing out was the sensible choice. Yet Clara was the only one who knew there’d been someone else in the shaft last night, and that might be a critical piece of the puzzle necessary to solve the case. Could she really risk letting a killer walk free?
But what good is that knowledge if I have no idea how to find that person? The only motive I had thought of was just crushed, and there are dozens of people with silver keys. We can’t go interrogate all of them.
Think, Casewell. Look at the evidence. Discard your assumptions.
Mother Radegund had a gold key last night, and at no other time. Her death could be tied to that. She might have been doing the same thing I did—sneaking into the archives without permission—in which case she could have been found out and killed for it. Possibly by someone tied to the conspiracy. Or someone killed her to steal the key from her.
No, wait. That didn’t fit. Radegund said she’d been waiting for someone, which didn’t fit someone who was unexpectedly caught.
Clara opened the notebook again and flipped through its pages, hoping there’d be some sort of clue about who Radegund was planning to meet with. Yet it held nothing but bets.
Bets… I was stuck thinking about the people who placed them, but that’s not the only angle. Even if it’s not about the punters, it could still be about the racehorses. After all, only a single person would be invited to sit in the front row of the canonization ceremony with the Ecumenical Council, meaning that position signaled great prestige within the Church.
Could it be enough to kill for?
Three names stood out as the most frequent picks: Mother Cornelia had the lead, with Inquisitor Roderick not far behind, and Mother Radegund a distant third. That meant two more suspects.
Clara could easily see the uptight Cornelia having problems with Radegund, and Sister Beth had specifically said that Roderick didn’t get on well with her either. Which makes sense, since he’s the relic keeper and she kept telling everyone the relics are fake. I wonder if that was actually true.
Maybe one of them wanted the seat for themselves. Or maybe Roderick just didn’t want someone who discredited his work to have it.
Clara closed her eyes. It was a plausible motive, but something was nagging at her.
Inquisitor Roderick, the relic keeper. Why do I feel like I know the name? Leofric was once a relic hunter, but that could just be a coinciden—
No.
The truth was in the files.
Specifically, inside Inquisitor Mildine’s file, which had a list of the inquisitors-in-training she’d mentored.
Leofric was one of them.
And Roderick was another.