Read Chapter 13: The Secret Passage

The knock came at Terce, three slow blows against the oak of my cell door. I did not answer. The knock came again, harder. Then Brother Jerome's wheeze through the crack: "Thomas. The abbot requires your presence at Sext. See that you are... prepared."

Prepared. As if I were being readied for a hanging.

I waited until his sandals scraped away down the corridor, then counted to a hundred for safety. The lock on my door was simple—a sliding bar on the outside, meant to keep a man honest, not a man desperate. I had no tools, but I had something better: memory.

Seven years ago, before the abbey renovated the east range, I had helped catalogue the old guest quarters. The walls then were lath and plaster, crumbling with age. The renovation had bricked over a service stair that once connected the upper floor to the chapel's undercroft. I had watched the masons seal it, noting how the new wall met the old at a slight angle, leaving a gap just wide enough for a man—if that man were willing to squeeze and scrape.

I pressed my palm against the far corner of my cell, where a tapestry of Saint Benedict hung crooked. The fabric was stiff with dust. Behind it, the plaster had been patched poorly, a pale scar against the older limewash. I dug my fingers into the seam and pulled.

Plaster crumbled like dry bread. Beneath it, the bricked-up doorway. The masons had done their work well, but mortar ages faster than stone. I worked at the bricks with the iron nail I had pulled from my sandal heel the night before, gouging at the weakened joints. It took the better part of an hour, but one brick finally loosened, then another. I made the opening just wide enough to slip through, leaving my habit's hem on a jagged edge as I wriggled into the darkness beyond.

The space between walls was cold and close, filled with the must of decades. I moved by touch, one hand on each side, shuffling sideways like a crab. Dust clogged my nose until I breathed through my mouth. Somewhere below, I heard the drip of water—the undercroft, and beyond it, the crypt. The passage sloped, then turned sharply, and I nearly fell through an opening into a narrow stairwell winding down.

I had no light. I counted steps—twelve, twenty, thirty—until the air changed, growing damp and earthy. A door at the bottom, warped but unlatched. I pushed, and it swung open into the chapel's undercroft, where the brothers stored old vestments and the broken remains of the pre-Conquest altar.

The chapel floor above creaked with footsteps. Sext was approaching; the brothers would be gathering. I crouched beneath the heavy beams, listening. Voices murmured, then settled. The abbot's tones were low but carried—a man who expected to be heard.

"...and so it gives me great joy to announce that Sir Godfrey, in his piety and generosity, has seen fit to endow the abbey with a new bell, to be cast in thanks for the season's harvest. The bell will bear the abbey's name and will ring out across the valley as a symbol of our enduring bond with the Ashwick estate."

A pause. Murmurs of approval. Then the abbot again, his voice straining toward something like warmth: "In recognition of this gift, I have agreed that the abbey shall extend its prayers for the soul of Sir Godfrey's late father, and shall open our hospitality to Sir Godfrey's household for the coming feast of Saint Michael."

The silence that followed was not the silence of contentment. I knew that silence. It was the hush of men who had just heard a sentence pronounced and were too afraid to ask its meaning.

I slipped out from beneath the chapel and moved through the cloister's shadowed edge, keeping to the arcade where the morning sun did not yet reach. The door to Anselm's old cell—sealed since his disappearance—was no more than a step from the infirmary, tucked at the end of the dormitory's far wing. I had passed it a hundred times. I had never once seen it opened.

The lock was new. Bright iron, recently fitted. Someone had wanted to keep Anselm's secrets.

I worked at it with the same nail, but it was sturdier than my door's bar. The hasp gave way before the lock did—old wood splitting along a crack the damp had widened. Inside, the cell smelled of dried herbs and something sharper, almost acrid. Dust lay thick on the floor except where a recent foot had dragged a path to the bedside table.

Anselm had been a meticulous man. His cell reflected it: a narrow cot with a straw mattress neatly tied, a writing desk with a shuttered inkwell, a shelf of botanical treatises. But beneath the bed, where the dust had not been disturbed in weeks, I found a loose floorboard.

The board lifted easily. Beneath it lay a leather pouch, oiled against the damp, and a bundle of parchment tied with twine.

The pouch held roots. Pale, finger-thick, forked at the ends like tiny men reaching up from the earth. I recognized the smell—earthy, bitter, with a hint of something sweet that clung to the back of the throat. It was the root Brother William had been grinding on the night he died.

The parchment was a letter, half-finished, in Anselm's tight, careful hand. The ink had bled slightly, as if written in haste. I read by the light from the cell's single high window.

"...and so I have confirmed what I long suspected. The root, when prepared as I have described, does not kill. It mimics. The subject falls into a state so near death that even the most learned physician would pronounce the soul departed. But the heart yet beats, slow and faint, and within the space of three days—if no further harm is done—the subject may wake, as from a deep sleep. I cannot give this knowledge to the abbot, for I fear he would use it only to...

The letter ended mid-sentence. The nib had scratched through the parchment on the final stroke, as if Anselm had been interrupted.

I read it again. Then again. Mimics death. Not kills. I thought of Brother William's gray face, the way his limbs had stiffened so quickly. I thought of the rat in my cell, dead within minutes of the ink I had fed it. Anselm had not written of the ink. He had written of the root itself.

The root, prepared as I have described.

I turned the pouch over. On its underside, stitched in faded thread, was a single letter: A.

A for Anselm. Or perhaps A for Ashwick.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor outside. I shoved the pouch into my habit and slid the loose board back into place, but the footsteps did not stop at Anselm's door. They passed. I breathed again, then stepped to the door and peered through the gap left by the failed hasp.

Brother Mark was walking away down the corridor, his head bowed, his hands clasped as if in prayer. But he was counting doors, his eyes flicking to each one as he passed. When he reached the dormitory's end, he paused. Looked back. Then he turned his gaze directly at Anselm's cell.

He could not see me. The gap was too narrow, the shadow too deep. But he stood there a full measure, unmoving, as if listening.

Then he walked on.

I waited until his footsteps faded, then moved in the opposite direction—toward the infirmary, where the herb garden lay, and beyond it, the wall.

The pouch was warm against my chest. The root could mimic death. Anselm had known it. And someone had buried him for it.

The bell for Sext began to toll. It was time to be elsewhere.