The second murder investigation for the very medieval pair, Brother Hermitage and Wat the Weaver.
England 1067: Henri de Turold, King William's favourite hunting companion has been murdered. How anyone actually did it, given the remarkably personal nature of the fatal wound, is a bit of a mystery.
Lord Robert Grosmal, of disordered mind, disordered castle and Henri's host at the time, knows that King William gets very tetchy when his friends are murdered. He sends to the nearby monastery of De'Ath's Dingle for a monk to investigate.
Medieval monks are usually good at this sort of thing.
Brother Hermitage is a medieval monk but he's not very good at this sort of thing. Motivated by the point of a sword he and his companion Wat the weaver set off to solve the crime.
Oh, by the way King William is arriving that night so they better get a move on.
Brother Hermitage's second criminal investigation reveals many things. Improvement is not among them.
If you are looking for a poignant evocation of the medieval world, an insightful exploration of the characters of the time, buy a different book. Ellis Peters is quite good.
Reveiws of "The Heretics of Death"
'I laughed 'till I cried,' 5*
'medieval hysterical mystery – must read!' 5*
'buy this book. It is cheap and it will make you laugh ' 5*
'I don't think I'm the target audience,' 1*
Excerpt
Caput I
These were very dark ages. Thus mused Henri de Turold as he stumbled through one of the very darkest bits and stubbed his toes on a beam of worm ridden english oak. Cursing the entire species, its ghastly country and the truly awful people to an eternity of pain, he hopped on down the corridor.
'But we’re emerging from the darkness sire, these are modern times,' learned men told him. To Henri’s way of thinking emergence from the dark would be a lot quicker if he set fire to England and all the learned men in it.
It would have to be said that Henri’s way of thinking was slow and laborious at the best of times. If anyone wanted feathers putting on their arrows they would turn to Henri de Turold. If they wanted a decent conversation they'd turn to the Goose.
He made up for this absence of brain with a huge portion of good looks, being a towering five foot nine if he was an inch. He had a chest like a barrel, the inside of one, and a stomach that couldn't muster the strength to reach his belt, let along hang over it.. When he stood up straight his knees were so far apart that he didn’t so much mount a horse as overcome it.
His face was normally an example of Norman power and grandeur having been hit very hard, many times by horses’ hooves, which had re-arranged his features into that pattern most favoured by the ladies of the Norman court. At this particular moment his visage was contorted into a grimace of disdain that almost made him look English.
This strange moment of the night saw him stumbling through the very strange castle of his fellow Norman, and intellectual equal Lord Robert Grosmal. Henri appreciated that Grosmal deserved the estate as reward for slaughtering the women and children of Hastings, but why had he filled it with darkness? The darkness of England wasn’t darker than anywhere else but he always felt it was ignoring him somehow. Not like Norman darkness, that was friendly and welcoming and allowed you to get up to all sorts of things without being spotted.
To rid himself of this cursed gloom he held a candle in front of him. This should have done something to dispel the gloom but seemed in league with the murk and strangely reluctant to help. It was a long, fat thing with a flame on top but those were all the candle-like qualities it was prepared to accommodate.
The candle maker of Robert Grosmal had a reputation and it wasn't a good one. The thing guttered and spluttered and dropped about enough light to illuminate its own shaft, which, being made of something truly unspeakable, was best not illuminated at all. No one knew quite what it was the man did to a candle but they all knew it was horrible. They were the only variety which could make a moth leave a room.
'What the hell am I doing here?' Henri mumbled for about the third time as drips of almost sentient wax did their best to cling on to the life of the candle before dropping towards the floor, swerving strangely as they went and landing with a soft, yet hot splash on his naked toes.
Walking naked through the halls of this disgusting house in January was clearly mad, but then walking anywhere naked in January was mad. de Turold didn’t normally take any clothes off at all between October and May, and even then was considered outlandishly hardy. His only splash of common sense was the floppy yellow cloth hat on his head. Perhaps this would postpone the moment he froze to death.
It was his desires, long dormant or else satisfied by killing things, which had taken control of his body and he was only following orders.
Over dinner that night the Saxon Lady Foella, an English beauty of such distinction she almost looked French, had hinted that if he were to walk naked from his chamber to hers there might be a warm welcome for him.
His reverie was broken and dragged to the present by an odour. Here was the opening to Robert's new fangled garderobe and Henri paused for a moment to consider his bowels, or rather they considered him by rattling like six squirrels in a sack of walnuts. Knowing all the trouble he had been having lately he thought he ought to visit the facilities before descending, literally he hoped, on Lady Foella.
A testing clench of his muscles released a scent which would have made a pig of little discernment vomit, never mind a noble lady. This odour of ordure did brief battle with the scents drifting from the garderobe itself but gave up an unequal battle and retired from the field. If Henri had been visiting a serving girl she could have been told to clean up afterwards, but Foella had class.
Nipping quickly into the room he followed one of the garderobe night lights as its disgusting smoke seeped into the air. There were two planted on the stone paving by sides of two holes, badly knocked into the chamber floor. He could have sworn his candle flickered at the others, probably just the wind.
Above the holes, propped off the ground by lumps of wood were two slabs of stone with matching holes which Lord Robert optimistically called seats. The candles burned in the room as a courtesy to light the way for visitors, or at least to stop them crapping on the floor by mistake.
Setting himself down on the nearest ice-trimmed hole he prepared to let drop. He didn’t need to prepare long as his lower intestine wanted rid of its contents faster than Henri wanted to get at Lady Foella’s.
Henri put his own candle far away and bent to move the other so the fumes would find some direction of travel other than up his nose. This candle was firmly stuck to the floor by its own excreted wax and so he gave it a tug. He frowned for a moment as below the noise of his own evacuation he could have sworn he heard something. One second later he was dead.
Professional Reviews
Laugh till you cry
Another hilarious, funny and brilliant book. I cannot wait for the next installment of Brother Hermitage and Wat the Weaver. Please keep them coming!
Book I of Southern Swallow Series – 12th Century scholar Li K'ai-men takes command of his first official assignments during a time of political unrest and barbarian invasions.
Book I of Southern Swallow Series – 12th Century scholar Li K'ai-men takes command of his first official assignments during a time of political unrest and barbarian invasions.
