The Abbot's Missing Toe Bone

• Chapter 1 Matins and Misfortune
• Chapter 2 The Empty Reliquary
• Chapter 3 The Abbot’s Panic
• Chapter 4 Sub-Prior Eustace Takes Inventory
• Chapter 5 Scouring the Crypt
• Chapter 6 A Whispered Heresy at Lauds
• Chapter 7 The Scribe's Errant Ledger
• Chapter 8 Dust, Cobwebs, and Contraband
• Chapter 9 The Novices Form a Committee
• Chapter 10 Brother Jerome’s Soup Conspiracy
• Chapter 11 Holy Phalanx in the Cloister
• Chapter 12 Canonical Grievances Filed in Triplicate
• Chapter 13 The Cellarer’s Illicit Schnapps
• Chapter 14 High Noon and Higher Decibels
• Chapter 15 The Council of the Scriptorium
• Chapter 16 A Brief Schism Behind the Latrines
• Chapter 17 The Liturgy of Recrimination
• Chapter 18 Vespers of Mutual Excommunication
• Chapter 19 Sacristan at the Brink
• Chapter 20 Papal Bulls and Garden Shears
• Chapter 21 The Abbot Demands an Indulgence
• Chapter 22 In Pursuit of the Monastery Cat
• Chapter 23 The Cartulary Under Siege
• Chapter 24 Compline in Chaos
• Chapter 25 The Slipper and the Sinner
• Chapter 26 The Great Silence Broken

The bell for Matins rang precisely at three o’clock in the morning, an ungodly hour that had nevertheless enjoyed divine sanction within the Abbey of Saint Jude-in-the-Fens for roughly six centuries. It was not a melodious chime. Cast during the reign of an impoverished monarch who had diluted the bronze with an excess of cheap lead, the bell produced a sour, flatulent clang that penetrated stone, oak, and the deepest layers of woollen habit. It did not so much summon the brethren to prayer as it evicted them from the mercy of unconsciousness.

Brother Barnaby was the first to stumble into the cloister, his leather slippers scuffing against flagstones slick with the perpetual seepage of the surrounding fenland. He had neglected to trim his wick the night before, and so held aloft an earthenware lamp that smoked abominably, smelling intensely of rendered mutton tallow. Barnaby was thirty-four years of age, though monastic damp and an uninterrupted diet of boiled turnip had imparted to his posture the weary curvature of an elder willow. Behind him, emerging from the cold dormitory stairs like disgruntled shades from purgatory, drifted the rest of the community.

There were twenty-four of them, a modest flock whose collective spiritual temperature hovered somewhere between tepid resignation and virulent administrative spite. They did not speak; the Rule of Saint Benedict forbade conversation from Compline until after Prime, a merciful injunction that spared them several hours of daily insult. Instead, they exchanged glances heavy with nocturnal malice. Brother Martin, whose bunions flared whenever a northern front approached, glared at Brother Barnaby’s sputtering lamp. Father Timothy, the infirmarian, hawked quietly into his sleeve, his chest rattling with a chronic catarrh that served as the monastery’s secondary timepiece.

At the head of the procession walked Abbot Hugo. He was a man of substantial bulk, possessing the kind of majestic circumference that suggested less an ascetic pursuit of the desert fathers and more a keen personal interest in the estate’s tithe-cheeses. Hugo moved with the ponderous deliberation of a laden river barge, his silk-trimmed cowl pulled tightly over his jowls to ward off the fen-damp. He despised the night office. He despised the damp. Most keenly of all, he despised the fact that the Duke of Burgundy’s envoy was scheduled to arrive by noon to inspect the abbey’s spiritual assets, chief among which was the sacred reliquary.

The choir was freezing. A thin glaze of rime had formed upon the brass eagle of the lectern. The monks filed into their designated stalls, the dark, worm-eaten oak groaning under their collective weight. Brother Paul, whose duties as precentor included maintaining some semblance of unison among men who were tone-deaf by nature and stubborn by habit, raised his tuning pipe. He blew a faint, breathy note that sounded like a dying plover.

Abbot Hugo settled into the abbatial stall, an elaborate wooden throne carved with depictions of the virtues trampling various grotesque vices. The wood was cold enough to bite through three layers of habit and a sheepskin tunic. Hugo winced, resting his podgy hands upon the carved armrests. On his right, Sub-Prior Eustace stood already erect, clutching a small, leather-bound notebook and a charcoal pencil. Eustace never swayed, never leaned, and apparently never slept; he existed in an agony of vigilance, perpetually waiting for someone to violate the rubrics so that he might enter the infraction into the annals of the house.

"Domine, labia mea aperies," intoned the Abbot, his voice thick with phlegm and interrupted slumber. O Lord, open my lips.

"Et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam," the choir responded, a ragged, discordant murmur that rose into the shadowy vaults of the nave and perished among the cobwebs. And my mouth shall declare Thy praise.

The service commenced its customary, lumbering progress through the psalms. Matins at Saint Jude-in-the-Fens was not an aesthetic triumph. Brother Barnaby was tasked with turning the leaves of the great choir antiphonary, an enormous tome bound in calfskin that rested upon the central reading desk. It was heavy enough to require the services of two men to carry it from the vestry, and its vellum leaves crackled like dried reeds in the dead quiet of the church.

As the community launched into the third psalm, Abbot Hugo let his heavy eyelids drop. He had mastered the art of vertical dozing over twenty years of ecclesiastical advancement. The trick lay in balancing the chin upon the soft folds of the cowl, maintaining a slight, rhythmic nod that could be mistaken by an inattentive sub-prior for pious assent to the Davidic verses.

To the Abbot’s left, Brother Ambrose, the sacristan, looked distinctly unwell. Ambrose was an anxious, spindly creature whose fingers were permanently stained with lamp oil and beeswax. He was responsible for the high altar, the vestments, the plate, and, above all, the treasures of the shrine. At this moment, however, Ambrose was not singing. His eyes were wide, fixed with terrifying intensity upon the far wall of the south transept, where the Shrine of the Holy Phalange lay shrouded in darkness.

Hugo noticed the silence beside him, not through divine revelation, but because Ambrose was usually a loud, flat baritone whose attempts at Gregorian chant sounded like a gate swinging on ungreased hinges. The Abbot cracked an eyelid.

"Ambrose," Hugo murmured under cover of the seventh verse of Psalm Sixty-Seven, scarcely parting his lips. "Sing, you miserable scarecrow. Eustace is watching."

Ambrose did not sing. His breathing was rapid, shallow, and audible over the monotone rumble of the stall opposite. "My Lord Abbot," the sacristan breathed back, his voice trembling like a dry leaf. "The lantern."

"What about the lantern?" Hugo grunted, not shifting his gaze from the distant, unlit crucifix above the rood screen. "If you have let the sanctuary lamp go out again, I shall set you to cleaning the grease-traps in the kitchen until Michaelmas."

"It is not out, Father," whispered Ambrose. "It is red."

The Abbot frowned, though he took care not to disrupt the serene tilt of his head. The sanctuary lamp, a brass vessel hanging by three chains before the iron grate of the relic chapel, was kept fueled with olive oil from a specific, exceedingly expensive merchant in Bristol. By ancient statute, it burned with a pale, steady white glow. It was the eye of the saint watching over the fen.

Hugo shifted slightly, angling his bulk toward the south transept. The shadows there were deep, pooled like ink in the arches between the Norman pillars. Yet, through the iron grille that protected the reliquary niche, a distinct, ruddy glare was visible. It did not possess the gentle, flickering demeanor of holy oil. It looked harsh, low, and irregular, casting sharp, jagged shadows of the wrought-iron bars against the whitewashed masonry of the ambulatory wall.

In the choir stalls, the psalm ground to a halt. Brother Paul had stopped waving his hand, distracted by the sudden, irregular breathing of the brethren. Monks were creatures of instinct; any deviation from the centuries-old routine of the office was felt immediately, like a sudden drop in atmospheric pressure before a thunderclap. Heads turned. Hoods rustled. Sub-Prior Eustace’s charcoal pencil hovered a fraction of an inch above his notebook.

"Brother Barnaby," the Abbot commanded softly, abandoning the liturgy entirely. "The candle."

Barnaby snatched a tallow taper from the lectern, nearly setting fire to the vellum margin of a thirteenth-century gradual, and hurried down the choir steps. The Abbot rose with an effort, his knees issuing two distinct cracks that echoed through the chancel with the authority of small pistol shots. Followed by Ambrose, whose hands were clasped so tightly together that the knuckles showed white, Hugo descended to the cold paving of the crossing.

The air grew perceptibly colder as they neared the south transept. The abbey church had been built upon a gravel spur jutting into the peat bogs, and its foundations had a habit of weeping saltpeter whenever the river rose. The smell here was an ancient, sour mixture of cold limestone, decayed rush mats, and the faint, sweet trace of centuries of cheap incense.

They reached the iron gate of the chapel. The gate was locked; Hugo could see the massive iron padlock, forged during the reign of King Stephen, still firmly engaged in its hasp. That, at least, was a relief. The keys to this gate were four in number: one held by the Abbot, one by the Prior (currently confined to his bed with the dry rot in his hip), one by the Sacristan, and one deposited in the common chest under triple guard.

Yet, beyond the iron bars, the scene was entirely wrong.

The shrine of Saint Jude-in-the-Fens—not the apostle, but an obscure seventh-century hermit who had supposedly lived for forty years on an island of reeds, subsisting entirely on marsh-grass and holy contemplation—occupied a stone dais against the east wall. Upon this dais sat the Reliquary of the Holy Phalange: a magnificent casket of gilded oak, adorned with rock crystals, cabochon garnets, and small, roughly hammered plaques depicting the saint driving water-demons into the bog. Within it, nestled upon a cushion of purple Byzantine silk, was the abbey’s most precious possession: the distal toe bone of the hermit’s left foot, a relic celebrated across three counties for its efficacy against ague, ringworm, and boundary disputes.

The red light did not come from a miracle. It came from a cracked horn lantern sitting directly upon the stone altar, its shutter propped open with an unsharpened quill. Beside the lantern lay a chipped pewter mug, smelling faintly of sour small-beer, and an iron pry-bar roughly eighteen inches long, its curved tip flaked with fresh paint.

"Ambrose," Abbot Hugo whispered, the words whistling through the gaps in his teeth. "The key."

Ambrose fumbled desperately at the leather purse slung from his girdle. His fingers were shaking so violently that he dropped the ring twice; it clattered loudly on the flagstones, the sound ringing out into the nave where twenty-two monks stood craned forward in their stalls like geese peering over a stone dyke. On the third attempt, the sacristan managed to thrust the heavy iron key into the lock. It turned with a shriek of dry metal that set Hugo’s teeth on edge.

The gate swung inward on its hinges.

Hugo stepped into the chapel, his slippers crunching slightly on something brittle. He looked down. Scattered across the paving were dozens of small, irregular fragments of gilded wood and flakes of red gesso, looking uncomfortably like the dried scales of a dead fish.

The Abbot lifted his gaze to the stone altar.

The Great Reliquary of Saint Jude was still there, but it was no longer in a state to inspire pious donations from Burgundian envoys. The lid, a pitched structure resembling the roof of a miniature cathedral, had been wrenched entirely off its silver pins. It lay on its side amidst a drift of wood shavings and tattered silk. The interior of the casket—a shallow trough lined with faded, moth-eaten velvet—was illuminated with brutal clarity by the horn lantern.

It was completely empty.

There was no silk cushion. There was no parchment scroll of authentication bearing the seal of the fourth Bishop of Lincoln. And, most devastatingly of all, there was no distal toe bone. Where the holiest fragment of the holy hermit had rested since the year of the great murrain, there remained only a dead beetle and a small, distinct circle of grey dust.

The Abbot stood motionless. His large, fleshy face, usually flushed with the healthy, ruddy hue of well-aged claret, went through a series of rapid chromatic transformations: from rose to mottled liver, from liver to chalk, and finally settling upon the sickly, parchment-yellow of an old ledger.

"Ambrose," Hugo whispered.

The sacristan had sunk to his knees upon the flags, his hands clutching at his tonsure. "Mercy, Domine," he whimpered. "The locks were whole at Compline. I examined the bars with my own hands. I touched the padlock. It was cold. It was seated. By the Blessed Virgin, by Saint Jude himself, it was intact!"

"The locks are whole now, you blithering fool," Hugo hissed, his voice dropping an octave into a register of terrifying, strangled fury. He pointed a thick, trembling finger at the gate, which still stood open, its iron bolt extended cleanly into empty air. "The lock was not broken. The door was unlocked. Then it was relocked. And now the lid is pried off with an implement belonging, if I am not mistaken, to the abbey blacksmith."

He reached down and gingerly lifted the iron pry-bar with the sleeve of his cowl, as if it were a venomous snake. Stamped into the cold metal near the crook was the small, distinct mark of a cleft horseshoe: the mark of Brother Giles, the lay blacksmith who worked the abbey’s forge down by the water-gate.

Behind them, the slow, rhythmic click of leather against stone announced the arrival of Sub-Prior Eustace. Eustace did not look horrified; he looked profoundly interested. His thin, ferret-like nose twitched slightly as he surveyed the devastation within the niche, his pencil already poised over the blank sheepskin of his notebook.

"A grave irregularity," Eustace observed, his voice entirely devoid of panic, expressing instead that supreme, icy satisfaction unique to junior officials who have caught their superiors in an inescapable dereliction of duty. "A profound breach of the eighth chapter of the Rule, concerning the preservation of monastic property. One might even argue a violation of the third council of the Lateran, regarding the custody of sacred pledges."

"Shut your mouth, Eustace," the Abbot snarled, not turning around. "Shut your wretched mouth or I shall have you walled into the butter-cellar."

"The Duke’s proctor," Eustace continued smoothly, unperturbed by the threat, "will arrive at the seventh hour. He brings, if the cartulary serves, the draft of the treaty concerning the fen-drainage rights, which is contingent upon his viewing the toe. His Grace has gout in the foot, as your paternity is well aware, and desires the relic to be applied to his left great toe before he signs the transfer of the tithes."

Hugo closed his eyes. The fen-drainage tithes represented forty pounds silver a year. Forty pounds silver meant the difference between paying the King’s collectors their wool-tax and having the monastery’s sheep seized at the shearing-pens. It meant the difference between white bread on feast days and a winter spent gnawing upon salt herrings that smelled of the bilge.

"Where is it?" Hugo whispered. He turned on Ambrose with an agility that defied his girth, seizing the kneeling sacristan by the front of his scapular and hauling him up until their noses were barely three inches apart. "Where have you put it, you idiot? Did you take it out to polish it? Did you take it to the infirmary to cure Father Timothy’s boils? Speak, man, before I forget the holy habit I wear and strangle you with your own girdle!"

"I have not touched it!" Ambrose wailed, his eyes rolling back until only the whites showed. "I have not touched the bone since the Feast of the Translation! It was there at sundown! I saw it through the crystal! It was resting on its silk, small and brown, looking just as it always does, like a withered walnut!"

"A withered walnut does not have four legs and walk out through iron bars," Hugo growled, shaking the monk until his teeth clicked together.

"My Lord," Brother Barnaby called timidly from the gate of the chapel. He was still holding the smoking tallow lamp, which was now dripping hot fat directly onto his left shoe. "The brethren... they are waiting in the stalls. The Matins psalm was left at verse fourteen. Should we... should we proceed to the Magnificat?"

"No, we should not proceed to the Magnificat!" the Abbot roared, his voice finally breaking through the whisper and echoing down the vast, empty length of the church like a roll of distant thunder.

In the stalls, the twenty-odd monks stiffened. The singing had completely died away. The silence that fell over the Abbey of Saint Jude-in-the-Fens was thick, cold, and terrible. Through the high, unglazed clerestory windows of the nave, the first thin, grey light of dawn was beginning to seep, revealing the grime on the stones, the damp on the pillars, and the vast, catastrophic emptiness of the gilded box upon the altar.

The day had begun, and the saint was gone.

The silence in the south transept was not a holy silence. It was the taut, breathless quiet that precedes a catastrophic roof collapse or the sudden arrival of an episcopal visitor when the books have been cooked. Abbot Hugo stood motionless before the stone altar, staring into the gutted interior of the wooden casket as if, by sheer force of abbatial will, he might induce a miraculous regeneration of seventh-century osseous tissue.

The Reliquary of the Holy Phalange had been designed in 1184 by a Master Bartholomew of Lincoln, a craftsman who had evidently combined a deep reverence for the Almighty with a shrewd, commercial understanding of monastic vanity. The outer box was fashioned from heart-of-oak thick enough to stop a crossbow bolt, covered in beaten sheets of gilded copper and held together by three dozen silver rivets, each fashioned in the shape of a cherub’s head. Its pitched roof was adorned with forty-two cabochon garnets, seven rock crystals of questionable clarity, and a row of small bronze spouts meant to gargoyle water away should the chapel ever suffer an unlikely vertical inundation.

Inside, however, where Saint Jude’s distal toe bone had rested for over two centuries, there was now only the stark, indifferent void of plain deal paneling. The purple velvet lining, faded by decades of tallow smoke to the color of a bruised plum, had been violently peeled back from its brass tacks. A single dried beetle lay upside down in the corner, its tiny legs folded in an posture of ancient despair, accompanied by a scattering of grey dust that might have been centuries of accumulated fen-drift or the disintegrating remnants of the saint’s silk cushion.

"Look at it," Hugo whispered, his large hand gesturing toward the wreckage with a deadpan, terrible gravity. "Look at the sheer, unbridled malice of it. They did not even leave the cushion."

Sub-Prior Eustace adjusted his spectacles, stepping forward with the cold, methodical curiosity of an auditor examining an insolvent baker's accounts. He leaned over the lip of the chest, taking care that the wide sleeve of his habit did not come into contact with the tallow grease smearing the altar stone.

"The velvet has been sheared off near the tack-heads with a blunt instrument," Eustace noted, his charcoal pencil scratching dryly against the sheepskin of his notebook. "A pair of shears, likely from the tailor's shop, or perhaps a small kitchen knife. Notice, also, the complete absence of divine intervention. There are no scorch marks. There is no lingering scent of heavenly myrrh. If this were a miraculous translation to a higher realm, as occurred with Saint Guthlac’s belt in '94, one would expect at least a localized odor of lilies or a faint glow upon the masonry. Instead, we have the smell of cheap ale and unwashed wool."

"Thank you, Eustace," Hugo said, his tone dripping with ironical venom. "Your grasp of demonology and small-craft burglary is a comfort to us all in this hour of trial."

"I merely record the physical evidence, Father Abbot," Eustace replied, leaning closer to inspect the interior corners. "It is my duty under Section Four of the Customs of Saint Jude to document all changes to the inventory of the higher altars. The bone, being item seventeen on the Great Register of Sacred Treasures, must now be marked as desiderata, or possibly alienata, depending upon whether a ransom note is received before Sext."

Brother Ambrose let out a soft, bubbling groan and slipped lower onto the flagstones until his nose was nearly touching the iron key ring he had dropped earlier. "I am ruined," he muttered into the dust. "The Bishop will flay me. He will revoke my sacristy privileges. He will send me to the cell at Marsh-End to dig peat until my fingers rot."

"Get up, you wretched creature," Hugo barked, nudging the sacristan with the toe of his leather slipper. "No one is going to Marsh-End until I have determined which of my beloved brethren has committed this act of high treason against the house."

"You suspect the community?" Eustace asked, his eyebrows arching above his wire rims like two thin, inquisitive caterpillars. "A bold hypothesis. To breach the inner sanctuary requires four distinct factors: access to the key ring, knowledge of the sacristy routines, an iron bar from the forge, and a degree of moral turpitude rarely seen outside the Benedictine houses of the southern province."

The Abbot turned to face the chapel archway. In the crossing beyond, the faint, grey twilight of the approaching morning was beginning to filter through the lancet windows, illuminating the ranks of monks still standing in the choir stalls. They looked like twenty-two black-robed obelisks, completely frozen, their eyes locked onto the small group gathered in the transept. Word had clearly passed down the line with the speed of an outbreak of dysentery; even Brother Martin had forgotten his bunions and was leaning forward over the stall rail, his mouth slightly agape.

Hugo picked up the horn lantern left behind by the intruder. It was a crude, battered thing, assembled from brass scrap and sheets of scraped ox-horn that had grown cloudy with age and heat. He held it up to his nose and sniffed cautiously.

"Rancid lard," the Abbot pronounced. "Not our oil. We burn mutton tallow in the nave and olive oil in the sanctuary. This is pig fat. Kitchen scrapings."

"Brother Jerome," Eustace murmured instantly, writing down the name with a soft, scritching sound. "The cook uses lard for the Tuesday pasties."

"The cook uses lard for everything, including the axle-trees of the bread wagon," Hugo snapped. "Half the fen smells of pig fat. What of this?" He held up the iron pry-bar, taking care to hold it by the clean center shaft. "You saw the mark, Eustace?"

"The cleft shoe," Eustace said, squinting at the cold iron. "The mark of Brother Giles. Forged in the outer smithy no more than six months ago, if the style of the heel-turn is any indication. Giles uses a high-carbon bog-iron from the eastern ditches."

"So we have a pry-bar from the blacksmith, lard from the kitchen, and a padlock opened with a key that belongs to either myself, the bedridden Prior, Ambrose here, or the locked chest in the chapter-house," Hugo summarized, his voice dropping into a dangerous, rhythmic rumble. "Either we are dealing with a syndicate of extraordinary operational sophistication, or the thief is an utter idiot who has left a complete inventory of his household goods upon the altar."

"The latter is far more consistent with the general intellectual level of this house," Eustace remarked drily.

The Abbot stepped out of the reliquary chapel, the heavy oak floorboards groaning under his weight as he marched toward the choir steps. The twenty-two monks in the stalls collectively leaned back, a synchronized movement of wool and linen that resembled a black sea anemone retracting its tentacles in a sudden tide.

Hugo stopped at the lectern, placing his beefy hands upon the carved wings of the brass eagle. He looked up at his community. For six years he had governed the Abbey of Saint Jude-in-the-Fens through a delicate balance of calculated inertia, moderate corruption, and the occasional judicious distribution of extra butter-rations. He knew every man before him: their secret hoards of dried plums, their illicit dogs, their forged medical certificates, and their total, unyielding aversion to hard labor.

"Brethren," Hugo began, his voice carrying clearly into the cold, vaulted roof. "A great light has gone out in Israel. Or, to speak with greater precision, someone has stolen the toe."

A low, collective murmur rippled through the stalls. Brother Paul, the precentor, crossed himself thrice in rapid succession, while Brother Barnaby dropped his smoking tallow lamp entirely. It fell onto the steps with a heavy wooden clatter, spilling a dark pool of lukewarm mutton fat across the step before sputtering into extinction.

"I shall not at this moment," the Abbot continued, raising a hand to stem the rising tide of pious ejaculations, "inquire as to which among you has succumbed to the machinations of the Prince of Darkness. Nor shall I dwell upon the fact that the thief exercised such poor taste as to execute this outrage on the very morning that the Duke of Burgundy’s representative is due to arrive with forty pounds of silver for the fen-drainage rights."

He let the figure of forty pounds hang in the air. Monastic eyes widened. Even the simplest novices understood the relationship between forty pounds silver and the winter supply of firewood.

"What I will say," Hugo boomed, leaning over the eagle until the brass beak seemed to be pointing directly at Brother Martin’s head, "is that if that piece of holy bone is not returned to its rightful place—or at least placed in a location where it may be 'discovered' with suitable dramatic flair before the noon bell—there will be no further rations of white bread, no ale above small-beer strength, and no dispensation from the midnight office for any brother under the age of eighty until the Feast of the Purification!"

A collective gasp of horror rose from the stalls.

"Father Abbot!" called out Father Timothy, the infirmarian, coughing violently into his sleeve before finding his voice. "The Rule! The Rule of Saint Benedict specifically provides that the sick and infirm shall not be deprived of their winter ale!"

"The Rule of Saint Benedict," Hugo shouted back, "did not envision a situation where a bunch of ungrateful fen-dwellers would purloin the house's chief capital asset hours before an audit! The church is closed. The gates are locked. No one leaves the precincts. Sub-Prior Eustace, you will take Brother Barnaby and seal the cartulary and the vestry. Ambrose, stop weeping on the flagstones and sweep up those gilding flakes before you step on them."

"And the office, my Lord?" asked Brother Paul, holding his wooden tuning pipe like a tiny, defenseless club. "We were at the fourteenth verse of the psalm."

"The office is suspended!" Hugo declared, an unprecedented liturgical emergency that caused Sub-Prior Eustace to scribble so furiously his charcoal point snapped with a sharp pop. "We shall not sing another note to Almighty God until we have found His servant’s toe. To your quarters—and if I see one monk near the blacksmith’s shop before Lauds, I shall have him put in the irons!"

The Abbot turned on his heel and strode down the central aisle toward the west door, his silk-trimmed cowl flapping behind him like the wings of a furious, overgrown raven.

Behind him, the empty reliquary sat in its cold stone niche, illuminated only by the red glow of the thief’s abandoned lard-lantern, its open lid resembling the gape of a wooden mouth laughing in the dark.

The sacristy was a narrow, vault-roofed chamber situated behind the high altar, smelling permanently of damp linen, beeswax, and the sharp, vinegar scent of cheap altar wine. It was here that the monastery’s physical treasures were kept under double lock: the silver chalices, the silk chasubles that had survived three royal confiscations, and the leather-bound registers that recorded who owed the abbey for the use of its grain-mill.

Hugo sat heavily in the sacristan’s arm-chair, a ancient piece of furniture whose horsehair stuffing was leaking through its leather seams like dried marsh-grass. His knees throbbed with a dull, persistent ache that usually signaled rain, though in the fens rain was less a weather event and more an underlying condition of existence.

Opposite him stood Sub-Prior Eustace, holding his notebook in one hand and the retrieved pry-bar in the other. Between them on the oak table lay the physical remnants of the scene: the horn lantern, the pewter mug, and the iron key ring that Ambrose had surrendered with many piteous sobs.

"Let us be logical," Eustace said, setting the pry-bar down with a dull metal clink. "Logical analysis is the only tool that will preserve us from the emotional hysteria currently sweeping the dormitory."

"I do not want logical analysis, Eustace," Hugo groaned, resting his forehead against his plump palms. "I want a small, brown piece of dry bone about two inches long. If you can produce one from your sleeve through logical analysis, I shall make you Grand Almoner by Vespers."

"Consider the facts," Eustace insisted, completely ignoring the Abbot's gloom. "First: the outer gate of the chapel was locked. The lock was not picked; the bolt was thrown by a key. There are four keys. Yours is currently in your girdle-purse. I have verified its presence."

Hugo reached down, squeezed the heavy iron key through the leather of his purse, and grunted. "It has not left my side since I took off my shoes at Compline."

"Second," Eustace continued, ticking the points off on his thin, ink-stained fingers, "the Prior’s key is in his cell. I visited Brother Anselm five minutes ago. He is still bedridden, suffering from his customary dry rot, and was in a state of profound torpor induced by Father Timothy’s poppy-syrup. His key was pinned to his night-cap with a brass wire. I had to unpin it myself; he did not even wake."

"Which leaves Ambrose’s key," Hugo said, "and the reserve key in the common chest."

"Ambrose swears he held his key all night," said Eustace. "However, Ambrose is a man of notoriously fragile temperament who frequently loses his spectacles in the holy water stoup. It is entirely possible someone lifted it from his belt while he was nodding off during the long reading at Matins three days ago, had a copy forged, and returned it."

"Forged?" Hugo looked up, his brow furrowing. "To forge a key like that requires a smithy. A forge with a fire hot enough to work iron."

"Which brings us back to Brother Giles," Eustace said with a faint, thin smile that possessed all the warmth of a winter frost on a tombstone. "And the pry-bar. Which bears his mark."

"Giles is as dumb as an ox and twice as pious," Hugo muttered. "He spends his days hammering shoes for the marsh-ponies and crying whenever a horse gets a nail in its frog. He has not the wit to forge a key to a reliquary, let alone plan a heist to coincide with the Burgundian envoy's arrival."

"Simplicity of mind is often a convenient cloak for cunning," Eustace remarked. "And we must not forget the pewter mug." He reached over and lifted the vessel, tilting it toward the light. "It contains the dregs of a very specific liquor. It is not our standard small-beer. It is thick, dark, and smells distinctly of juniper."

Hugo sniffed at the rim of the mug. His eyes opened slightly wider. "Schnapps."

"Indeed," Eustace said. "Schnapps of the northern variety. The sort imported illegally through the wash by the Dutch timber-merchants who dock at the lower sluice."

"Brother Benedict," Hugo whispered. "The cellarer."

"Brother Benedict," Eustace agreed, "who has sole access to the import stores, who frequently trades dried eels with the boatmen for spirits, and who was seen by the night-watchman near the buttery hatch at two of the clock."

The Abbot sat back, the horsehair in his chair squeaking in protest. The circle of suspicion was not narrowing; it was expanding to include virtually every department of the monastic administration. The blacksmith supplied the iron; the cellarer supplied the drink; the cook supplied the lard; the sacristan supplied the negligence.

"If this gets out," Hugo said quietly, "the Bishop will suspend our charter. He has been looking for an excuse to annex our fen-pastures for his nephew’s sheep-farm since the Synod of Peterborough. If he finds we cannot even keep track of our primary saint, he will declare the house degenerate and turn us all out into the marsh."

"Not to mention the Duke of Burgundy," Eustace added helpfully. "His envoy, Sir Guy de la Roche, is an notoriously short-tempered man who lost three fingers at Agincourt and takes a very firm line on contractual default. If he discovers the relic he came to apply to his master's gouty toe is missing, he will likely burn the gatehouse and demand the return of the advance deposit."

"How much was the advance deposit?" Hugo asked, though he already knew the answer.

"Twenty-five pounds silver," Eustace said. "Which you spent in November on the new roof for the abbatial buttery."

Hugo groaned again, longer and deeper this time, a sound that seemed to come from the very depths of his substantial abdomen. He reached out and grabbed the iron pry-bar, turning it over in his hands. The metal was cold, smooth where it had been worn by long use, and rough at the curved edge where it had been levered against the oak lid of the reliquary.

"We must find it," the Abbot said, his voice dropping into a desperate, hard tone. "We have six hours before the Burgundians reach the causeway. Six hours to find two inches of dry bone in a monastery that covers four acres of ruins, cellars, ditches, and pig-sties."

"And if we do not find it?" Eustace asked, his pencil poised over a fresh page.

Hugo looked up, his small, sharp eyes fixing the Sub-Prior with a look of utter, unscrupulous resolve.

"If we do not find it, Eustace," the Abbot said, "we shall have to make one."

Eustace stopped writing. For the first time that morning, a genuine expression of shock crossed his pale, sharp face. "Make one? A saint’s toe? My Lord Abbot, that would be... that would be a canonical fraud of the highest order. A violation of four distinct papal bulls!"

"It would be a bone, Eustace," Hugo said cold-bloodedly. "Saint Jude was a man of small stature, was he not?"

"According to the legend, he was five feet tall and had six toes on his left foot," Eustace replied mechanically.

"Well then," Hugo said, rising from his chair with an air of sudden, grim determination. "The kitchen must have a lard-bucket full of mutton knuckles from yesterday’s broth. Go and fetch Brother Jerome. And tell him to bring his carving knife."

Eustace stood motionless for a moment, his pencil hovering in the air like a tiny wooden spear. Then, slowly, with the quiet resignation of a man who sees his lifelong ambition of becoming a respectable chronicler collapsing into a mire of forged osteology, he lowered his notebook.

"Mutton knuckles, Father Abbot?" he asked quietly.

"Mutton knuckles, Eustace," Hugo replied. "And make sure they are well boiled. We cannot have Saint Jude smelling of onion."