'What are you frightened of?' I scoffed. 'She can hardly hang herself with them!'
Mandeville crunched the beads together, weighed them in his hand and looked at the guard.
'You watch her all the time?'
The guard pointed to the small squint hole high in the door.
'All the time, Sir Edmund,' he replied.
Mandeville tossed the beads to him. 'Let her have them but watch her closely.'
I returned to my chamber. Benjamin was still asleep so I made myself comfortable in a chair, wrapped a rug round me and dozed fitfully until he shook me awake just after dawn. We did not bother to shave or wash. The room had grown cold because the flight of the servants meant no fresh logs had been brought up and the water in the lavarium was now covered with a film of dirty ice. We went downstairs and I marvelled at how Mandeville had brought everything under control. He had worked the soldiers all night. Every chamber except ours had been stripped. All clothes, possessions, anything which could be moved - chests, chairs, mattresses, bolsters, canopies, drapes, cups and plate - had been piled in the hall and the doors sealed. Mandeville, satisfied with what he had done, led us into the buttery where we managed to find some stale bread and a jug of watery ale.
'Everything's ready,' he informed us, snatching mouthfuls of bread. 'Southgate will stay here under a small guard until the other soldiers arrive. When he is able, he will be moved to the infirmary at Glastonbury and then to London. All the moveables of this manor are now piled in the hall and the door sealed against further thievery. The King's Commissioners will arrive and make sure everything due to the crown is seized.'
(Too bloody straight, I thought. Henry VIII's Commissioners were the most heartless set of bastards. They would snatch a crust of bread from a dying child!)
'And Mistress Rachel?' my master asked.
'She has breakfasted and been allowed to wash and change. She and I will be on the road to London within the hour.'
Mandeville was as good as his word: a short while later we heard him shouting his farewells and going down to the main courtyard where the dead sheriff's soldiers, much the worse for drink, were saddling their horses. We glimpsed Mistress Rachel in the centre of them, cloaked and hooded, her hands tied to the saddle horn, another rope under the horse's belly securing her ankles. Sir Edmund mounted and, after a great deal of clattering and shouting, the party made its way out of the manor. Never once did Rachel stir, never once look to left or right or back at Templecombe which had cost her so much. God rest her, I never saw her again.
For a while Benjamin and I went round the manor house, now empty and quiet as a tomb. Only two or three soldiers remained under the command of a burly sergeant. We visited Southgate but he still lay swathed in bandages attended by the old hags who seemed impervious to the tumult around them, being well paid by Mandeville to look after his lieutenant.
It was like visiting a house of ghosts. So difficult to imagine how, only a few days earlier, Lady Beatrice had swept round as grand as a duchess; Sir John had acted the benevolent lord; and Mistress Rachel had watched and plotted behind a demeanour as serene as a nun's.
Now, as I have said, it's hard for you young people to imagine such terrors but during Fat Henry's reign such occurrences became common. Time and again the King's agents would swoop on some great houses - Thomas Moore's, Wolsey's, Cromwell's, Boleyn's, Rochford's, Howard's - and the effect was always the same. One day it was all gaiety and dancing and the next despair and ruin.
Ah, well, it was no different at Templecombe. Benjamin was lost in his thoughts. The only time he smiled was when I informed him about Rachel wanting her rosary beads. I also pressed him on how he had made the woman confess.
'Later,' he murmured. 'Everything in its due time, Roger.'
He seemed restless, wanting to make sure Mandeville had left. Then, about noon, when the soldiers were busy broaching a new cask of ale, he borrowed a huge mallet from the cellar and bustled me out of the house, down to the Templar chapel. Now he became excited, his face flushed, and once inside the church, locked and barred the door, making sure the windows were also closed. 'What's the matter, Benjamin?'
He turned to me, the mallet gripped tightly between his two hands.
'Don't you remember Hopkins's verse? "Beneath Jordan's water Christ's cup does rest, and above Moses' Ark the sword that's best"?'
'You think the relics are here?'
Benjamin put down the mallet and walked up the church, under the rood screen and into the sanctuary. He pointed out the old stalls where the Templars had stood to sing the divine office, and the misericords, the intricately wooden carving on each upraised seat.
'What do you see there, Roger?'