The man shakes his head. He would cross himself if not encumbered with a chisel in hand. ‘By St Barbara, I swear it moved,’ a monk exclaims.
He says mildly, ‘Masters, as you see, it is but a garment.’
Are these Englishmen? Are these the conquerors of Agincourt? Fear jumps and runs like fleas under the skin. Someone trundles up with a long pole and a short ladder, and prods at the coat as if it were a hanged man subject to indignities by the state. He says to the mason, ‘Master? Will you proceed?’
Three more blows. Each one shuddering its way into the body, making the heart pound. ‘Crowbar,’ he says.
When the lid of the chest moves, a smell creeps out, a stench like a plague pit. It is like a knock with a cudgel. Every man steps back. He has a flask of
‘I am ready,’ the mason says. ‘Assist me, sirs?’
One-two-three: master and man heave the lid aside, upending it on the ground. Dr Layton is at his shoulder. In the shadows the monks trample and snuffle and pray out loud.
Inside the chest there is not enough to make a man. The saint’s ribs are gone, unless ribs are what form this residue; his fingers dust through it. The long bones have been crossed – forearm and shin, thigh bone and the thick bone from the upper arm. They form a square: laid in the centre of it, a skull.
The mason says, ‘Christ alive! Shall I, sir? Or will you?’
‘You,’ he says. ‘Hold up so all can see. If I do it myself they will not believe it. They will think it is a conjuring trick.’
Arm raised aloft, the workman displays the skull. The witnesses gasp. The dogs set up a roar. Their shapes plunge and dart. ‘Down, down!’ their keepers shout. Only the cloth man hangs overhead, serene.
Well, says Dr Layton, either the silver skull is Becket or this one is; no saint is so special he has two heads.
The stench, he notices, is dissipating, or dispersing into a general foulness: the cooling sweat of fear, the fasting breath of early morning. He could swear some monk has pissed himself – or let us say it is one of the brutes running in the nave. He can pick out their shapes now, their muscular bouncing frames, their open jaws and lolling tongues. He turns up the skull between his hands. His fingers explore the calvarium. They emerge through the battered eye sockets. ‘Well – whence comes this second relic?’
If this is Becket’s skull, who is the nameless wretch in the silver cap, kissed more in death than in life, the lips of princesses pressed to his noddle? Did he die of an ague? Did he choke on a plum stone? Did the monks say, ‘Nobody owns this fellow, we’ll make him into a Becket?’ Then bump his cadaver into a yard, and go at it with a hatchet?
He lays the naked skull back in the chest, between the crossed bones. This shrine is as thorough a forgery as you will get, he remarks. We do not even know if these are Becket’s, these thighs, these shins. There could be any number of confused corpses here.
How cold it has grown: as if the year had leapt from leaf-fall to Advent. Dr Layton rubs his hands. ‘Are we done, my lord? I will make a note of everything we have found. I have witnessed with my own eyes.’
The bell rings for the dawn office. When they step out into the air, they can see their breath. The stars fade around them. ‘My lord Cromwell,’ one of the monks says, ‘we have prepared …’
‘Another tomb will not be needed. The king wants the bones.’
The man gapes at him. Only the cloister’s long discipline stops him from crying out in distress. ‘He will not be buried here?’
‘Prise the silver from the skull,’ he says. ‘Have it weighed and list it with the other metal. Put what remains back into the chest, with the other skull, and indeed any more skulls you may turn up; it would not surprise me if that treacherous knave had six heads. I shall take the chest with me today. Give it to Monsieur Christophe here. You need not reseal it.’
The dogs are chained, led away – whining and grumbling, but wagging the stumps of their docked tails. After their night’s work they are hungry for breakfast. As are we all, if we can cough up the poison from our throats. ‘Give me that flask again?’ Christophe says.
He passes it over. ‘Keep it.’ He pulls Christophe close and says in his ear, ‘Get the bones to Austin Friars. If anyone asks where they are, they went on a cart and you never saw them after.’
He thinks, I want to be able to locate the knave at a moment’s notice. The king spits at the name of Becket, but give him a year or two and he may change his mind, and make him a saint again. Sad, but those are the times.
