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YORK 1224: On a
hot July night, Brother Clement is savagely murdered when returning from
administering to Lady Maud de Mowbray.
Simon de Hale,
Sheriff of Yorkshire, is in his office when Abbot Robert visits to inform him
of the murder, and request that he take responsibility for investigating the
killing.
Simon is unsure
whether the murder is a crime against the Abbey, or if it is a more personal
matter against the monk.
Commencing their
investigation, Simon and his deputy, Adam, ride out to see Lady Maud de Mowbray
at Overton - the last person to see Brother Clement alive. When they encounter
her son, Roger de Mowbray, they both take an instant dislike to him.
Lady Mowbray
reveals to Simon that she intends to leave her money to the Abbey, and Simon
can see this being a motive for the monk’s murder, if her son was aware of
this.
The investigation
gathers pace and a murder weapon is found.
A banquet is held
at the castle to honour the Royal Justice - during which, one of the guests is
exposed as the murderer and apprehended. But that will not be the end of the
story for Simon and his family.
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It was barely daybreak; the morning light was beginning to change the darkness of the night into the half-light of early morning. The long, dark shadows were starting to take shape and form in the dawn light. The young boy had escaped from the stables at the manor to sit under the oak tree outside the walls. He was safe there, away from the harsh stable-master, and the stillness of the morning air and the tree calmed him. Soon it would be time to make his way quietly back to the stables, before he was missed; but he had a little more time yet before the servants would start their daily chores, and the horses would need feeding. The tree was his sanctuary; it was the one thing that was steadfast in his world and offered him solace. As long as he could escape to sit beneath its sheltered canopy, then he could face anything that might happen to him under the harsh stable master.
In the darkness, the boy
blended in with the gnarled trunk of the old tree and the man coming out of the
manor gate, had no idea that he had been seen. The boy watched with curiosity
as the man walked around the corner of the manor walls towards the midden,
where the spoil from the kitchens was dumped. It was away from the main
entrance of the manor, and out of sight for any arriving guests; and where the
aroma of rotting food would not impinge on the main house. The boy wondered why
someone should be going around to the midden at dawn, and his curiosity was
piqued even more as he watched the man take something out of his cloak and bury
it in the depth of the midden. The man stopped and looked around himself, but
the boy was well hidden in the shadows of the night. He watched as the man
quickly made his way back along the wall and then disappeared inside the wooden
gate into the manor complex.
The boy waited for a while
to make sure the man wasn’t coming back and then stole quietly from his place
under the tree and walked across the grass to where he had been standing at the
midden. He was intrigued to know what the man had concealed beneath the scraps
of waste and peelings. It took him a little while of digging into the pile of
waste before his hand felt the cold sharpness of what had been hidden. His
fingers grasped around it, and he pulled it out so that he could look at it in
the increasing daylight. The dagger was beautiful, with its ornate carving on
the blade. The boy turned it around in his hands; he had never seen anything
like it before and now it was his. The boy decided he would hide it in the barn
where he slept, burying it deep in the hay, so no-one else would find it. It
was a treasure that he didn’t want anyone else to see.
Jill lives on the Island of Guernsey now, but is originally from
Yorkshire. She has a love of early medieval history which led her to study the
subject at Huddersfield College in the 1980's. Working in Leeds at the time,
meant that she had access to the Yorkshire Archaeological Society on their late
night opening and following research, she wondered what the lives of the people
she read about were actually like. This started a love of writing historical
fiction, but her initial stories were never sent to a publisher. Life and work
then intervened and writing was put to one side. It was only following a
workshop held by the Guernsey Literary Festival in 2024 on writing historical
fiction, that her love of writing was reignited. Her first novel 'A Brotherly
Devotion' was published in July 2025.
Social Media Links – Facebook: Jill Bray – Author
and Twitter/X @JillBray67
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