It was as bad, and worse. We had to search diligently to find someone who could tell us anything, and even then the significance of what we heard was slow to sink home to us. The monk on duty at the main gate told us that a messenger had run up, staggering, a short time earlier, shouting his tidings to the winds in a voice filled with panic and outrage. Fortunately, Father Dominic, our Sub-abbot, had been present, doing penance by praying in the pouring rain, and he had spirited the man directly into the Abbey proper before he could upset any of the brethren.
Duncan grasped my arm and pushed me firmly towards the Abbot’s quarters, where Dominic and the Father Abbot himself told us what little they knew.
It seemed that a party of women from the town really had been attacked on their way to the Abbey early that morning. There had been five women in the group, Dominic told us. All of them had been sexually violated, two of them killed in the process; the three survivors had been badly beaten and were all unconscious. They had been taken to the nunnery just outside the Abbey precincts, where they had been placed under the care of a visiting Hospitaller knight from Rome, and no one was sure if any of them would live out the day. If any did regain consciousness, it remained to be seen whether they would be able—or willing—to identify their assailants. It was a stupefying crime, the like of which had never been known in Paisley, and no one was yet equipped to deal with it.
Duncan, ever the pragmatist, immediately asked the question foremost in my own mind: Who were these women? No one, it seemed, knew at this point, though Dominic had already sent his deputy out to discover all he could. What was known was that they appeared to have been attacked on a public pathway, within shouting distance of the nearest houses, and subdued quickly before being herded off the road and into a copse. They had been found by a local blacksmith, who had gone for a pre-dawn walk in the rain to clear his ale-clogged head before going to work and stumbled upon the scene. He had not recognized any of the women, presumably because they had all been in bloodied disarray and he himself had been too badly shaken to look closely at them.
The Abbot and Sub-abbot, being who they were, wanted to start prayers for the victims immediately, but my cousin Duncan was far more concerned with the how and why of this event than he was with anything else. He kept interrupting Father Abbot with questions. Who could have done such a thing? That was the primary question, and even as he asked it, I sensed the overwhelming implications, for it was instantly clear to me that no one in Paisley town would have dared to contemplate such a sin. The worst ne’er-dowells in the community were, at worst, opportunistic thieves and pickpockets, and thus it followed that the attackers were unlikely to be local men. The surprise, abduction, and violation of five women suggested a large and organized group of men.
Duncan sucked air between his front teeth as he turned to me. “Soldiery,” he said, making no attempt to hide his disgust. There were soldiers everywhere that autumn, Scots and English both. “But whose? And how and where do we start to look for them?”
I didn’t even have to think about it. “Where the attack took place. It will be a quagmire, so there should be tracks.”
“Aye, there will be,” Duncan answered, “but half the town of Paisley has likely traipsed through there by now, so it will be impossible to tell one set of tracks from another.”
“Not if we follow them away far enough from wherever this thing happened. None of the townsfolk would go running after that many men alone, especially in weather like this, and especially not murderers. I think we’ll be able to follow the tracks far enough to isolate them, sooner or later, and see if perhaps there’s something identifiable about them.”
He eyed me skeptically. “You don’t believe they would have scattered afterwards? That’s what I would have told them to do, had I been there.”
“Nah,” I said. “I don’t think so. Not if they’re strangers, and not in this weather. Too much danger of someone getting lost and caught. They would have stuck together, made their way out as a group, avoiding being seen. That tells me we’ll find a trail, though only God Himself knows where it may lead us.”
Duncan was gnawing at his lower lip, but then he jerked his head in agreement. “You could be right. Better fetch your foul-weather cloak, then. It’s nasty out there.”
2
The day was grey and leaden, almost dark, though it was not yet noon. The rain had grown heavier, and now the noise of it filled the air, drowning out everything else. I pulled the hood of my woollen foul-weather cloak down over my face and wrapped the rest of the garment as tightly about me as I could, fully aware that the carefully brushed-on coating of wax that covered its thickly felted surface would not stand up for long against this strong a downpour. Water puddled beneath our feet at every step, and none of it seemed to be draining away. Standing on the hard gravel of the Abbey’s forecourt, we were relatively safe from discomfort, but Duncan and I both knew that the moment we stepped off the gravel and into the grass, we would sink to the ankles. Not for the first time in my life, I wished for a solid pair of heavy boots, but monks and undistinguished priests wore simple sandals in all weather and all seasons, and so I was somewhat inured to painfully chilled feet.