This, the tale of the Poor Priest, Philip, is in some ways the best yet of Doherty's series of novels based on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The pilgrims, caught in an evening mist close to dangerous marshes on which they can make out lights ("corpse candles") flickering in the growing darkness, decide to stop for the night in a deserted village. The village has been empty since the Black Death thirty years earlier; it is eerie, and not made less so by the murmurings and imaginings of the pilgrims themselves - as motley a crowd as ever trod the road to Canterbury.
[They] all seemed to be acquainted with each other and he [the Summoner] definitely knew the Franklin. They had met many years ago on a blood-soaked island. He was sure of that, as he was sure that the Franklin had had a hand in his father's death. He would have liked to have talked to his colleague the Pardoner but he was now suspicious for the Summoner had recently discovered that the Franklin and the Pardoner were close friends. Indeed, this cunning man, with his bag full of relics and the bones of saints slung on a string round his neck, was certainly not what he claimed to be.
Behind the Summoner, the Friar, nervous of the cloying mist, plucked at the harp slung over his saddle horn. As he played, the Friar glanced furtively at the Monk riding alongside him. The Friar closed his eyes and strummed at the harp strings, calling up a little ditty he had learnt, anything to drive away the fears. He did not like the Monk sitting so arrogantly on his brown-berry palfrey: that smooth, fat face, those dark, soulless eyes and that smile, wolfish, the eye-teeth hanging down like jagged daggers. Who was the Monk? Why was the Knight so wary of him? And the latter's son? The young, golden-haired Squire, he always kept an eye on the Monk, hand on the pommel of his sword, as if he expected the Monk to launch a sudden assault upon his father, the Knight. Was the Monk, the Friar wondered, one of those strigoi mentioned by the Knight in his tale? Did the Monk belong to the Undead? Those damned souls who wandered the face of the earth, finding their sustenance in human blood?
The whole setting reminds Philip of another Kentish village, Scawsby, where he was once the priest, and when prevailed upon to tell a tale he tells them of the strange events in Scawsby during his time there.
In fact, he tells them, it had all begun much earlier, in 1308, in the reign of the present king's grandfather. A group of Templar Knights, fleeing from London to the coast, had been lured into just such treacherous marshes on just such a misty evening and there, mired and helpless, set upon by robbers led by the local lord of the manor and the parish priest.
'We have been trapped,' one of the knights whispered. 'They have led us into a marsh.'
'There must be paths!' Sir William exclaimed. 'Just like the one we are standing on.' He grasped his sword tighter. 'The Virgin, the Veronica?' [...]
An arrow whipped out of the darkness and took him full in the shoulder.
All the Templars are killed, but as he dies, their leader, Sir William Chasny, shouts "in English, in Latin, in French, 'We shall be watching you! We shall always be watching you!'"
Now seventy years later, following the suicide of the previous incumbent, a new young priest comes to the village with his brother. There, he is confronted by the past, for the church is full of ghosts, both good (the murdered Templars) and bad (especially that of Romanel, the priest who organised the massacre), full of voices whispering 'Spectamus te, semper spectamus te! We are watching you, we are always watching you!'
As if the ghosts were not enough, there is also an attack on the village by a band of French marauders. But why on this small inland village? Can they too be after the Templar treasure, Philip wonders?
And what is the coffin-woman's part in all this?
The tension builds as Doherty skillfully blends his three story lines: the pilgrims, among whom is the Poor Priest, who tells his own tale and that of his predecessor Romanel. But unlike Romanel, this priest in not interested in "treasure on earth". Will he therefore prove immune to the evil that has corrupted the souls of and led to the death of so many others?
JM
