Read Chapter 5: Whispers in the Herb Garden

The afternoon light had begun to slant through the herb garden’s low walls when Thomas left the scriptorium, the poisoned parchment a weight against his breast. He had tucked it beside the charter and the ink fragment, three secrets now pressed against his heart like a confession he could not utter.

Brother Cuthbert stood near the well, drawing water with the slow deliberation of a man who wished to be elsewhere. Thomas approached him with what he hoped was an unhurried stride, the way one might walk toward a brother to discuss the day’s readings.

“Cuthbert,” Thomas said, keeping his voice low. “I saw you in the scriptorium. When James fell.”

Cuthbert’s hands stilled on the rope. He did not turn. “We all saw it. The hand of God.”

“Did you see anything else? Anyone near his desk before he took his seat?”

The rope creaked as Cuthbert hauled the bucket to the lip of the well. Water slopped over the stone, darkening the packed earth. “I saw Brother Mark sharpen his quills. I saw Brother Paul copy the same psalm three times because his hand shook. I saw no one touch James’s parchment but James himself.”

“And after? When the brothers gathered around him?”

Cuthbert finally turned, his face weathered and unreadable. “I saw the abbot pray. I saw the novice—little Andrew—weep into his sleeve. I saw you, Brother Thomas, looking at a dying man’s hand as if it were a page to be read.”

Thomas felt the heat rise along his collar. “I was looking for the mark.”

“And you found it.” Cuthbert’s eyes dropped to Thomas’s chest, where the documents lay hidden. “You carry too much, Brother. I can see it in your posture, the way you hold your shoulders.”

“I carry nothing the abbot would not approve of.”

“The abbot approves of very little these days.” Cuthbert hoisted the bucket and turned toward the kitchen. Then he paused, his voice dropping to a near whisper. “If you seek answers, do not seek them among the living who watched. Seek them among the ones who are no longer here to watch.”

“Who do you mean?”

But Cuthbert was already walking, water sloshing from the bucket in silver arcs against the sun. Thomas watched him disappear through the kitchen door, the words hanging in the air like a riddle.

---

The refectory was nearly empty when Thomas made his rounds, the brothers having returned to their cells or duties after the midday meal. He found Brother Paul at the far table, copying—as Cuthbert had said—with a hand that trembled on every descender.

“Paul,” Thomas said, sliding onto the bench across from him. “May I speak with you about James?”

Paul’s pen scratched to a stop. His eyes were red-rimmed, and the paper before him was smudged with more than one corrected error. “I have nothing to say. I watched him die. I pray I never watch such a thing again.”

“You were closest to him. You worked at the desk beside his.”

“We all worked beside each other. That is the way of the scriptorium.”

“But you knew him better than the others. Did he speak of anything unusual? A disagreement with a brother? A task he had been given?”

Paul’s hand found a loose thread at the edge of his sleeve and worried it. “James was a good scribe. Quiet. He did not gossip, which is more than I can say for half the men in this abbey.” He looked up, and for a moment his grief sharpened into something harder. “But he had been uneasy of late. He said the parchment felt wrong. That it seemed heavier, smoother, like nothing he had used before.”

“Did he say where he had gotten it?”

“The same place we all get it—from the stores, from the chest Brother Anselm used to keep.”

The name landed like a stone in still water. Thomas kept his face still, but his mind was already racing. Anselm. The herbalist. The man who knew plants and their properties—which could soothe, and which could kill.

“Brother Anselm has been gone a month,” Thomas said carefully. “Who tends the stores now?”

“Brother Mark, I think. Or perhaps no one. There has been little order since Anselm left.” Paul’s voice caught. “He would have known what to do for James. He knew every herb, every tincture. He could have saved him.”

“Where did Anselm go?”

Paul shook his head. “No one knows. He simply did not appear at matins one morning. His cell was empty, his belongings gone. The abbot said he had been called away to tend a kinsman who was ill. But no one saw him leave, and no messenger came before his absence.”

Thomas filed this away, the shape of it fitting with the other loose pieces in his mind. “And the parchment stores—were they ever inventoried after he left?”

Paul gave him a curious look. “Why would we inventory parchment? It is parchment. It does not vanish.”

*No*, Thomas thought. *But it can be altered. Made deadly. Left in a chest for a scribe to take without knowing.*

He left Paul at his trembling letters and crossed the cloister, his feet carrying him past the infirmary and toward the garden where Anselm had once tended his herbs. The garden was modest—a dozen beds of sage and rue, feverfew and foxglove—but it was tended with the precision of a man who had loved his work. The soil was dark and rich, the rows neat, though weeds had begun to creep at the edges in the month since his departure.

Thomas knelt beside a bed of foxglove, its tall spires of purple bells swaying in the breeze. He knew the plant’s reputation—a poison that could stop a heart if misused, a medicine if measured with care. Anselm had known such distinctions better than any man in the abbey.

“He taught me to read the leaves,” came a small voice.

Thomas looked up to find Brother Andrew, the novice who had wept at James’s death, standing at the garden’s edge. The boy’s face was blotched with tears, but his eyes were bright, curious in a way that reminded Thomas of himself a decade earlier.

“Brother Anselm taught you?” Thomas asked.

Andrew nodded, stepping closer. “He knew everything. Which herbs to gather at dawn, which to gather at dusk. Which leaves would heal and which would harm. He said the garden was God’s second book, written in green.”

“Did he ever speak of leaving? Of a kinsman who was ill?”

The boy’s brow furrowed. “He did not speak of kinsmen. He spoke often of the parchment stores, though. He said the new batch from the mill was not right. That it smelled of the copper vats.” Andrew paused, his voice dropping to a whisper. “He said he intended to speak to the abbot about it. And then—the next morning, he was gone.”

Thomas’s pulse quickened. The copper smell. The residue in William’s basin. The poisoned parchment that had killed James. All of it circled back to Anselm, the herbalist who had noticed something wrong and had vanished before he could speak.

“Andrew,” Thomas said, keeping his voice gentle, “did Brother Anselm have any enemies here? Anyone who might have wished him harm?”

The boy considered this with the solemnity of the very young. “He argued with Brother Mark,” he said slowly. “About the parchment stores. Mark said the batch was fine, that Anselm was seeing things. They raised their voices, and I heard Mark say that if Anselm could not mind his own garden, perhaps he should not mind anything at all.”

“When was this?”

“The day before he left.”

Thomas stood, brushing the soil from his knees. His mind turned over the names like stones in a stream—Mark, who now controlled the stores. Anselm, who had disappeared before he could speak to the abbot. The parchment, poisoned and waiting in its chest.

He looked down at the novice, who was already wandering away, his grief momentarily forgotten in the garden’s quiet. Then he turned his gaze toward the scriptorium, where Brother Mark would be at his desk, sharpening his quills.

*Anselm is not gone*, Thomas thought. *He is dead—or he is the killer. And Mark knows more than he is telling.*

He set his jaw and began to walk—not toward the scriptorium, but toward the infirmary. The infirmarian had promised his help, and Thomas now had a name to put to his questions.

Behind him, the foxglove swayed in the evening wind, purple bells tolling a silent warning.