The Tainted Relic

Around Jerusalem, in July 1100, at the triumphant end of the First Crusade, when the crusaders go on a killing spree, some stand aside and watch in disgust. One such is Sir Geoffrey Mappestone (hero of Simon Beaufort's series of twelfth-century mysteries) and it is to him that a wild-looking monk named Peter wishes to entrust what he claims is a fragment of the True Cross, begging him to take it to Rome, where it will be safe.

Sir Geoffrey declines, Peter dies, the fragment passes into other hands, and so the story commences. For this fragment bears a curse: whoever is the holder of the phial that contains it will die as soon as he relinquishes it to someone else and whoever touches the actual fragment of wood stained with Christ's blood will, it seems, die within hours.

A series of writers take us on a journey through time as we follow the fragment to its arrival in England from France nearly a hundred years later, in the hands of a trader in relics, and witness the deaths that it causes in Devon (at the hands of Bernard Knight) and then Oxford (with Ian Morson) until a powerful Templar, Guillaume de Beaujeu, comes in search of it. But de Beaujeu, by now Grand Master of the Order, is killed at the seige of Acre, and the relic disappears from view again.

It resurfaces in Exeter in 1323, in a tale by Michael Jecks (featuring the ex-Templar Sir Baldwin de Furnshill), then in Cambridge in 1353, when Susanna Gregory (in a story featuring Dr Matthew Bartholomew - see also An Unholy Alliance) manages to link the two stories neatly, the young man who holds the relic at the end of the previous tale being an old man when the next tale opens. This kind of continuity is very welcome: the chief drawback of such a book is that each "Act" is a short story / novella in itself, with its own cast of characters, and so there is nothing, no personal involvement with a character, drawing you on into the next chapter.

But that said, I did read on, quite happily; in fact, very happily.

And in this case, at least, the disadvantages of a team of authors are more than made up for by the multiple view of the period(s) and the huge cast of characters, most of them rounded and memorable no matter how small a part they play. For instance Annie, whom I will never forget. (She is a survivor of the terrible famine that resulted from civil war and bad weather during the inglorious reign of Edward II.)

Rob first met her on the road from the north, up near Duryard, a mile or so north of the city. She had been a waif-like creature, all skin and gangling limbs, with huge eyes in a skull-like face, and he had at once taken pity on her.

'Hello, where are you from?'

'Tiverton.'

'Where are you going?'

'Exeter.'

Each word had seemed as though it must be dredged up, and each time it took a long while for her to mouth an answer, she was so exhausted.

'Do you have somewhere to go?'

'No.'

[...]

Annie obviously had a clear idea what she could do in Exeter.

'Come with me,' he said as kindly as he could. 'You don't want that game. I know a place ...'

Let's hope the "Medieval Murderers" do it again some time.