As I crossed the cloister yard an uncomfortable ache told me I needed to visit the privy. Brother Gabriel had pointed it out to me the night before; there was a quick way via the back of the infirmary across a yard to the reredorter, where the privy was housed.
I went through the infirmary hall again and out into the yard. It was enclosed on three sides and I saw a little stream had been culverted, running under a small bath house attached to the infirmary and on under the reredorter, so it could drain both. I had to admire the ingenuity of the monastic builders. Few houses, even in London, had such arrangements and I sometimes thought with foreboding of what would happen when the twenty-foot cesspit in my garden eventually filled up.
Chickens ran squawking round the yard, from which most of the snow had already been swept. A couple of pigs peered over the walls of a makeshift sty. Alice was feeding them, pouring a bucket of slops over the wall into their trough. I went over to her. My bodily need could wait a little.
'You have many duties, I see. Pigs as well as patients.'
She smiled dutifully. 'Yes, sir. A maid's work is never done.'
I looked over the sty, wondering whether something could be concealed among the straw and mud, but of course the brown hairy creatures would have rooted anything out. They might eat a bloody robe, but not a sword or a relic. I looked out over the yard. 'I see only hens. Have you no cockerel?'
She shook her head. 'No, sir. Poor Jonas is gone. It was he who was killed at the altar. He was a fine bird, his strutting antics used to make me laugh.'
'Yes, they are comical creatures. Like little kings marching and preening among their subjects.'
She smiled. 'That is how he was. His wicked little eyes would look at me with challenge as I approached. He would flap his wings angrily and shriek, but it was all for show. A step too close and he would turn and run.' To my surprise her large blue eyes filled with tears and she bowed her head. Evidently she had a warm heart as well as a stout one.
'That desecration was a wicked thing altogether,' I said.
'Poor Jonas.' She shook herself and took a deep breath.
'Tell me, Alice, when did you notice him gone?'
'The morning the murder was discovered.'
I glanced round the yard. 'There's no way in here, is there, save from the infirmary or the reredorter?'
'No, sir.'
I nodded. Another indication the killer had come from inside the monastery and knew the layout. A griping in my guts warned me not to tarry. Reluctantly, I excused myself and hurried off to the reredorter.
===OO=OOO=OO===
I had never been in a monks' privy. At school in Lichfield there were many jokes about what the monks got up to in there, but the privy at Scarnsea was ordinary enough. The stone walls of the long chamber were undecorated and the room was dim, for the only windows were high up. Along one wall lay a long bench with a row of circular holes, and at the far end there were three private cubicles for the obedentiaries' use. I made my way towards them, passing a couple of monks seated on the communal row. The young monk from the counting house was there. The monk next to him stood up and bowed to me awkwardly as he adjusted his habit before turning to his neighbour.
'Are you going to be there all morning, Athelstan?'
'Leave me be. I have the colic.'