The Perfect Sinner. Will Davenport

chapel will be staffed by one chaplain, which is to be me, plus five priests and four clerks, am I right? At a cost, I am told, of forty pounds a year. Forty pounds a year for ever. Not to mention a stone-built college for us all to live out the fullness of our lives in prayer, study and, if I know anything about my fellow priests, in dice and wine and maybe even the odd woman.’

      I frowned.

      ‘Oh yes,’ he went on. ‘It won’t all be holy and they may be very odd women.’

      That wasn’t why I frowned. I knew William Batokewaye well enough to overlook the licence he had just allowed himself. I’d often heard he had a wife tucked out of sight though if so, that was one of the few things he had ever tried to keep from me. My reputation again, you see. That sort of thing was allowed for lower orders but not for a mendicant friar as he was, or at least had been. Would he presume to bring her here to Slapton? That might test our friendship. I frowned because since that moment in the chapel the echoes of sweet Elizabeth’s forgotten voice, waking all my love, had been gradually fading in my head and now, knowing I had lost the sound of her, I was bereft.

      ‘My question is this,’ he said. ‘Forgive me, I’m not complaining. I look forward to a comfortable retirement from the rigours of the last thirty years. It is generous of you in the extreme to provide it, but, quite apart from the fact that I would have been prepared to mumble masses for you all day and most of the night for half that sum all by myself, what’s it all for?’ The priest was a year older than me and had been asking me that sort of question for as long as I could remember. Having no arm for defence, he only ever knew how to attack.

      ‘It’s a Chantry. You know what it’s for.’ I opened my arms to indicate the courtyard in which we sat, the church we had just left and its new stone tower which soared into the air, dominating the little village, overpowering the spire of the village church below.

      ‘I know what a Chantry’s for. What I’m asking is why do you need one?’

      I looked at him, suspecting a trap. He had always been a plain speaker and not one to follow slavishly along dogmatic lines, but this was going too far.

      ‘You can’t disapprove, William. You and I usually agree on what’s right and what’s wrong. I’ve built it so you and your priests will sing masses for my soul and for Elizabeth’s.’

      ‘And if we didn’t? If your soul had to stand up for itself without a lot of people, most of whom don’t know it very well, all singing flat on its behalf?’

      I stared at him. I was deeply disturbed by his tone. This was dangerous ground. ‘You know the story? The story of de Mowbray?’ I sometimes felt it was all I had thought about for years now.

      ‘I might. Tell me anyway.’

      ‘He begged his chaplain to sing a mass for his soul the moment he died. Do you know what happened?’

      Batokewaye sometimes looked as if he had been hewn from the huge trunk of an old elm tree and that look came upon him now, dense, unchangeable, so I went on. The chaplain ran straight from the deathbed. He was racing to the chapel but something stopped him. De Mowbray’s spectre, twisted and tortured. “You’ve broken your promise,” said the spectre. “No, I came straight here,” said the chaplain, “you died only a moment ago.” “In that time, twenty years have passed in Purgatory,” the ghost replied, “I have suffered twenty years of torment for your neglect. It is worse than Hell.”’

      He just went on looking at me. I thought perhaps he hadn’t been listening.

      ‘Worse than Hell, William’ I said again. ‘If a few moments here is twenty years there, imagine how it will be. Your soul stays there, paying the price of your sins, until Judgement Day itself.’ It turned my guts around to think of it, to think I had that coming, hurtling at me.

      He sighed. ‘Wherever I’ve been in the country, I’ve heard that story,’ he said. I’ve heard it said about Montague, Mauny, Beauchamp, Scrope, every single knight who has given up the ghost.’

      ‘Are you saying you don’t believe it?’

      I’m saying that Purgatory is a very good idea from the clergy’s point of view. I’m delighted at the chance to live in luxury off a terrified Lord.’

      ‘Should we not be terrified of Purgatory? If we die in mortal sin aren’t we bound to suffer there? Isn’t that what the Bible says?’

      The priest stared back at me, unblinking. ‘I know you, Guy. I’ve known you since long before you were a knight. I’ve heard everything you have to confess and I must say it’s been mild stuff. If you came to me to confess a real mortal sin, I’d know you were lying. All right, lying might be a sin but you’d have to try a lot harder to get committed to the eternal flames than by a grammatical paradox.’

      He thought he knew me. He didn’t. I had told him nothing of the last and greatest of my three sins.

      ‘There’s Heaven and there’s Hell,’ he went on, ‘and each of us is bound for one or the other. You have to earn your way into both of them and all we can do is pray to Saint Peter that he’ll be kind if we’re somewhere in between, which is where most of us are. And by the way, no it’s not what the Bible says at all. The Bible is fairly silent on the precise question of Purgatory. It’s a modern invention.’ The priest stood up, turned to face me, looming over me.

      ‘Look at you. Sir Guy de Bryan, noble Knight of the very choice Order of the Garter,’ he growled, ‘King’s companion, steward, holder of the Great Seal, ambassador, royal envoy. Thought of throughout the length and breadth of the land for years past as the finest knight there ever was, so clearly honest that you cast no shadow in the sunlight. It passes straight through you. So fair, you’ve been called in twenty times a year since you were old enough to wear a sword to sort out every brawling squabble the greedy nobility gets itself into. Trusted equally by the King and the Commons and that’s rare enough. Not a spot on your soul and yet you’re so afraid you’ve hired a phalanx of priests. You’re getting much too pious. You need to ease up on the piety. Do you understand anything about our Lord?’ He wheeled round and thrust his hand, finger outstretched to the top of the tower.

      ‘What’s that up there?’ he demanded.

      I looked up, squinting against the sun. The crucifix?’

      ‘That’s it. Don’t we take it for granted? Wasn’t it lucky Christ died on a cross?’

      Unsure where this could be leading, I frowned at him. ‘It was surely more than lucky, it was blessed,’

      ‘That wasn’t what I meant. Supposing Pilate had given him the option,’ rasped the priest, bending down to put his enormous face right in front of mine. ‘Supposing he’d said, all right Jesus, it’s up to you. Your choice. You can either be crucified or you can be stung to death by bees.’

      More heresy was in the wind. I stared at him.

      ‘Well, imagine,’ said the priest impatiently. ‘If he’d chosen the bees, what an inconvenient sign we’d have to make then.’ The priest waggled his hand around his face, fingers jabbing back and forth and let out a hoot of laughter.

      I crossed myself quickly as the rooks took off from the trees around the tower adding their shrieks to the echoes of the laugh. Remembering the figure up on the hill, I looked up there to see if there had been a witness to this blasphemy. There was nobody there now.

      ‘Oh come on, man,’ said the priest. ‘I suppose you think that’s another hundred years of Purgatory added to your sentence. If God hasn’t got a sense of humour, what hope is there for the world? Indeed, what hope is there for any of us if someone like you has to spend half your fortune on a place like this?’

      ‘Have you lost your faith?’ I asked. ‘It’s a few years since I’ve seen you, old friend. You don’t sound like a believer any more.’

      ‘Oh, don’t you dare doubt my belief,’ retorted the priest. ‘I may be old-fashioned, but I