A little way off, next to a large mound of charcoal, a brick furnace had been erected. It was swallowing lead; a gang of men on the church roof were throwing down chunks and strips of it. More of the auditors' men, waiting below, fetched the lead and fed it into the fire.
Cromwell had been right; the crop of surrenders he had obtained early in the winter had persuaded the other monastic houses that resistance was hopeless and every day now came news of another monastery dissolved. Soon none would be left. All over England abbots were retiring on fat pensions, while the brethren went to take up secular parishes or retire on their own, thinner, stipends. There were tales of much chaos; at the inn in Scarnsea, where I was staying, I heard that when the monks left the monastery three months before, half a dozen who were too old or sick to move any further had taken rooms there and refused to leave when their money ran out; the constable and his men had had to put them on the road. They had included the fat monk with the ulcerated leg, and poor, stupid Septimus.
When King Henry learned of the events at St Donatus he had ordered that it be razed to the ground. Portinari, Cromwell's Italian engineer, who even now was demolishing Lewes Priory, was coming on to Scarnsea afterwards to take down the buildings. I had heard he was very skilled; at Lewes he had managed to undermine the foundations so the whole church came tumbling down at one go in great clouds of dust; they said in Scarnsea it had been a wonderful and terrible sight, and looked forward to seeing the spectacle repeated.
It had been a hard winter, and Portinari had been unable to get his men and equipment down to the Channel coast before spring came. They would be at Scarnsea in a week, but first the Augmentations officers had arrived to take away everything of value, down to the lead from the roof and the brass from the bells. It was an Augmentations man who met me at the gatehouse and checked my commission; Bugge and the other servants were long gone.
I had been surprised when Cromwell sent a letter ordering me to Scarnsea to supervise the process. I had heard little from him since making a brief visit to Westminster to discuss my report in December. He told me then that he had endured an uncomfortable half-hour with the king when Henry learned that mayhem and murder at a religious house had been kept from him for weeks, and that his new commissioner's assistant had absconded with the old commissioner's killer. Perhaps the king had boxed his chief minister's ears, as I had heard he was wont to do; at all events Cromwell's manner had been brusque and he dismissed me without thanks. His favour, I had taken it, was withdrawn.
Although I still held the formal title of commissioner I was not needed, the Augmentations officers were more than capable of carrying out the work, and I wondered whether Cromwell had thought to make me revisit the scene of those terrible experiences as a punishment for that uncomfortable half-hour of his. It would have been characteristic.
Justice Copynger, now the king's tenant of the former monastery lands, stood a little way off with another man, looking over plans. I approached him, passing a couple of Augmentations officers carrying armfuls of books from the library and heaping them up in the courtyard, ready for burning.
Copynger grasped my hand. 'Commissioner, how are you? We have better weather now than when you were last here.'
'Indeed. Spring is almost come, though that is a cold wind from the sea. How do you find the abbot's house?'
'I have settled in most happily. Abbot Fabian kept it in good repair. When the monastery is down I will have a fine view over the Channel.' He waved towards the monks' cemetery, where men were busy digging up the headstones. 'See, over there I am making a paddock for my horses; I bought the monks' whole stable at a good price.'
'I hope you have not put Augmentations men to that work, Sir Gilbert,' I said with a smile. Copynger had been ennobled at Christmas, touched on the shoulder by a sword held by the king himself; Cromwell needed loyal men in the shires more than ever now.