After three or four days of fairly exhausting work I had compiled a list of all that was there, and found, to my horror, that the shelving system was no system at all. I had assumed that there was a system but that I had not been able to comprehend it. However, when I spoke to Sister Brigitte on the matter, I was soon disabused of that notion.

  ‘Originally,’ she said, ‘they were arranged in alphabetical order of their authors, but when we had a couple of substantial donations of books our chief concern was to get them under lock and key. I intended to go back and work out a system, but I’m afraid as more books arrived I became overwhelmed. That is why I am so pleased that you have come to give us the benefit of your experience.’

  Unfortunately, my experience was not that helpful. I was an ardent user of libraries, but I had never run one. It was like asking Fat Lysbeth for advice on buying a bed. I equipped myself with a large beaker of beer and a clean sheet of paper and set to work.

  Naturally, as a moral philosopher, I wanted a section on philosophy; but should I have a separate section for ethics, or was that just a subset of philosophy? Then I thought we should collect all the Bibles and Testaments together; but should the Commentaries be shelved with them, or separately? I suppose I could divide the books into dogmatics, apologetics and so on, but frankly I might just as well organise them by size or the colour of their binding.

  I started going down my list of titles annotating them according to subject: A for philosophy, B for bibles, C for personal testimonies and lives of the saints, and so on. That is what I was doing when I became aware of a commotion nearby. Fearing that some terrible accident must have befallen someone, I left my work to see if I could offer any assistance, and found poor Sister Veronica in a state of distress.

  ‘What has happened?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know! Nothing can be done! It’s terrible!’

  ‘Come,’ I said, ‘sit down and gather your thoughts, then you can tell me what has alarmed you.’

  Sister Veronica looked up at me. How much she could see with her elderly eyes I cannot say, but she seemed to look past me, staring blankly over my shoulder. ‘It cannot be! It’s too awful!’ she wailed.

  ‘What is?’ I persisted.

  ‘The thong of St Paul’s sandal,’ she replied. ‘It’s missing.’

  Useful conversation now stopped, because Sister Veronica broke into tears and I have never been good with crying women. I do not know what to do, although at least I know that instructing them to pull themselves together is unlikely to be fruitful and may lead to a period of unladylike language and miscellaneous abuse.

  Some women fling themselves against you as if in need of a hug, but if you offer a cuddle it may be misunderstood. A misunderstanding when they do not want an embrace is one thing, but when they misunderstand and still welcome the cuddle it can be very much worse, at least for me. I remember the occasion when a young serving maid in Steen’s Inn dropped my supper because the plate was hot and burst into tears. I held her burnt hand gently and gave her a soothing pat on the shoulder, which she interpreted as an invitation to sit on my lap. The whole thing was terribly embarrassing.

  Those of us who live celibate lives know very little about women, but also not much about physical contact. It always seems awkward to me. When I told our cook Mechtild that my grandmother had died, she comforted me by clasping my head to her bosom so tightly that I could not breathe and my ear went numb.

  Anyway, Sister Veronica sat on a stool and dabbed her tears with her sleeve. ‘I don’t understand it,’ she cried. ‘It was here yesterday. I had it in my hand as I dusted it.’

  ‘Perhaps you misplaced it?’ I suggested.

  ‘Every object has a specific place in the treasury. There isn’t a lot of space, so I have to be careful to put each item back precisely where it came from,’ she explained. ‘And nowadays I have to be especially particular because I don’t see as well as I used to, so that helps me to take them out without risking knocking something else over.’

  ‘But the cabinets are not locked,’ I pointed out. ‘Anyone could put something back in the wrong place.’

  ‘Yes, but the outer door is locked. If the sisters wish to venerate an object they are supposed to ask me to let them have it, and nobody has asked for St Paul’s thong. To be honest, it is not our most popular devotional object.’

  ‘And you put an object in the chapel each day?’

  ‘Yes, each in turn. The thong was last displayed three days ago.’

  ‘Well, let me help you to look for it.’

  I was hampered by the fact that when I was given my tour upon arrival, we went to the library before the treasury, and my head was spinning with thoughts of the books I had seen, so I had not paid close attention to the relics. Now, if a book had gone missing, I would have been in a much better position. Back home in Leiden I sometimes play a game with one of the librarians who has been at the university almost as long as I have. Each of us in turn names a book and the other has to respond with its exact location. You get one point for correctly identifying the shelf, but five points if you can name its position on that shelf.

  Not to put too fine a point on it, one sandal thong looks much like another to me, and in a convent where everyone wears sandals I am not sure that I could identify St Paul’s thong among others, but I thought the important thing was to find a sandal thong and then worry about whose it might be.

  I dropped to my knees and began a careful search of the floor. It was quite dark in the treasury which, of course, had only small barred windows, so I had to ask for an extra candle. Sister Veronica rushed to get it and soon we were both crawling around the floor finding a great many things, some of them quite unpleasant, but no thong.

  ‘It’s no good,’ Veronica announced. ‘I shall have to tell the Abbess. She will be very cross and will probably remove me from my position. But it’s only fair if I have failed to safeguard the treasures here.’

  She sniffled into her sleeve once more, then stiffened her back and marched out. I could see no point in intruding in that conversation, so I carried on searching the treasury, but to no avail.

  I heard footsteps approaching, looked up and caught a glimpse of two pairs of feet, one of them in white leather shoes.

  ‘Dr Mercurius! What are you doing down there?’ Abbess Mathilde asked me.

  ‘I was hoping I might find the missing item,’ I said, trying to be vague because I did not know how much Sister Veronica had disclosed during their talk.

  Mathilde walked to the cabinet and looked inside. ‘I hardly think it would be on the floor, since the box is still here.’

  ‘The box?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, it was in a small walnut box. This one, in fact.’

  I was confused. I rose to inspect the brown wooden item that she was offering me. ‘So it hasn’t gone?’

  ‘Yes, it has,’ Mathilde insisted, pointing to a small window cut in the side of the box. ‘The thong should be visible through the opening.’

  ‘So the box cannot be opened?’ I asked.

  ‘I suppose it might be smashed,’ Mathilde conceded. ‘But the craftsman who made it sealed it once the thong was inside.’

  ‘Then how was it removed?’ asked Sister Veronica.

  ‘Very dextrously, through the window using a pair of tweezers, I suppose,’ Mathilde replied.

  I was very glad that she did, because I had been puzzling about that myself.

  ‘The question is,’ Mathilde continued, ‘why they bothered instead of just stealing the whole box?’

  ‘Perhaps they hoped that the theft would not be noticed for a little longer?’ I suggested. ‘Sister, when did you say you last saw the thong?’

  ‘I’m sure it was there yesterday morning, because I dusted the shelf and the box. I cannot imagine that I would not have noticed it was missing then.’

  ‘Forgive me, but you said yourself that your eyesight is not as sharp as it once was,’ I said.

  ‘It was sharp enough to notice it was missing this morning,’ Mathilde pointed out. ‘If she could see today that it was missing, we must accept that she could have seen yesterday if it was missing,’

  I could not deny that. ‘Then whoever has it cannot have gone far,’ I proposed.

  ‘Whoever has it cannot have gone anywhere,’ Mathilde replied. ‘The gate to the guest house has been locked except while you came through, and nobody has been given leave to go out of the convent. Nor will they be. Sister Veronica, we need to verify that everyone is here. Ring the chapel bell three times summoning the sisters to prayer. Until the thong is found, nobody is to leave.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The alert reader may recall that when I first met Abbess Mathilde, it was at a church where someone was found dead in a locked library. Together, we had spent much time trying to work out how the murderer could have got in through a securely locked door. Now I had a trickier problem. Not only did I have to explain how someone got in through a locked door, but also how they got out again with the thong.

  No doubt relics are stolen from time to time. When you go to the great churches of Europe and they tell you where their relics came from, they use words like “acquired”, “liberated” and “collected”, but very rarely “bought”. Some monks are among the worst culprits. When I first went to England it was not long after a man called Blood tried to steal the Crown Jewels. I was told that at the start of the fourteenth century they actually were stolen, for which crime the king imprisoned nearly fifty monks. Let me be charitable and assume that they stole them to sell and give the proceeds to the poor.

  But what nun would steal a relic? And if not a nun, then who? Nobody else had been allowed into the convent, so unless there was some other way in that I did not know about, I could not see how it could have been done.

  We had all gathered in the chapel. I carefully scanned the choir stalls, checking that everyone was there. Even elderly Sister Barbara had been brought, though she was unable to sit properly and had been left on the litter that she had been carried in on.

  Abbess Mathilde led the company in prayer. Since it was not a canonical hour of prayer, several of the nuns were confused, but eventually joined in as expected; and since you are never very far from a canonical hour in a convent, the fact that extra prayers were being offered must have alerted them to the fact that something important must have happened.

  After the first set of prayers, Mathilde remained kneeling in silence for a minute or so, then rose elegantly to her feet. ‘Sisters! I have to inform you of a very grave matter. We have discovered that one of the convent’s relics is missing.’

  ‘Not the reliquary?’ gasped Sister Laura.

  ‘No, not the reliquary.’

  A number of the nuns turned to look at Sister Veronica, as if she had failed them in some way. She blushed and lowered her face.

  ‘If not the reliquary, then what?’ asked Sister Dorothea.

  ‘The thong from St Paul’s sandal,’ replied Abbess Mathilde.

  This pronouncement was followed by an audible intake of breath on all sides.

  ‘Who would do such a thing?’ demanded Sister Landrada.

  ‘It’s simple. Someone who wants to go to Hell,’ Sister Clotsindis replied. ‘Theft is a sin, so a great theft must be a great sin. It’s unpardonable.’

  ‘It is not for us to decide what can and cannot be pardoned, Sisters,’ Mathilde announced calmly. ‘Forgiveness and judgement belong to God alone.’

  I empathised with the sentiment, though I think our dear Stadhouder might have argued that pardon and punishment were in his gift too. He occasionally surprised me by pardoning evildoers, particularly if they were contrite or he could see some further use for them. Our colonies overseas needed competent men and better a deportation to the East Indies or Curaçao than a hanging here, I suppose — though conditions there were so testing that a high percentage of our men did not return. William was rather pious in an understated and inconsistent way, so it was quite likely that he would have enforced the death penalty for the theft, except, of course, that we had crossed the border and some German prince would decide what happened. If the villain was particularly unlucky, the convent would turn out to be in the lands of a bishop, in which event he was doomed. Churchmen hardly ever showed mercy. To their way of thinking, if someone had sinned, hanging them cleansed their soul and was therefore good for them, though I doubted that was much of a comfort when you were dangling from a rope or waiting for the axe to fall.

  I have spent some time in a condemned cell myself, and I have to say that I found the whole thing rather depressing. Somehow it is hard to take your mind off what is going to happen to you. In my case, I was innocent, and the Church teaches that unearned suffering goes a long way towards expediting your entry into Heaven, which I guess is a good thing. But like many things that the human being has to contemplate, it is a good thing when it happens to somebody else, and provokes mixed feelings when you’re the one looking up at the scaffold.

  I suddenly realised that I had not been paying attention to the Abbess’s words, so I cannot tell you what she said, except that she closed by inviting anyone who had useful information to speak to her, in private if they so wished. Privacy might loosen a tongue, but had the concomitant disadvantage that I would not know what they had said.

  Mathilde then called for silent meditation until the next hour of prayer. This was very inconvenient because I was itching to ask Sister Dorothea whether anyone could have left between Sister Veronica’s dusting the day before and the discovery of the relic’s disappearance. But I could hardly call across the chapel, nor could I shuffle on my knees to her place without drawing attention to myself. I had not heard the outer bell ring during that time, but I have to admit that when I am reading, a lot of things pass me by. There was a time, many years after these events, when I was in the library and failed to notice that someone had knocked over a lighted candle and set fire to a pile of papers. [No, Van der Meer, the readers do not need to know who it was. Let us gloss over that, if you want to keep your job.]

  Even if I was right, and nobody had tried to get in, that did not mean that nobody had managed to get out. To do so, they would have needed Sister Dorothea’s key, which I had seen firmly attached to her girdle. Unless, I suppose, there were duplicate keys. Presumably Abbess Mathilde had one, but there could be others. It is a relatively straightforward matter to press a borrowed key in a slab of wax and have a duplicate made. But the nearest blacksmith must be some distance away, and a nun would not have the money to pay for his services unless the Abbess gave her money, in which event Mathilde would know who it was. I supposed that nuns had to go to the market from time to time, and would have money to buy necessary items, or could divert money from the sums received for the items that the sisters made to support themselves. But outside the convent nuns always walked in pairs. They would have to be confederates in crime.

  Ah, but if confederates are brought into it, could a nun have stolen the thong and passed it to someone outside? I doubted that anyone could throw a thong well enough to reach the boundary fence, and women are not generally accounted to be good throwers anyway, though my grandmother was no slouch when it came to braining grandfather with a clog at fifteen paces. Clogs, however, are easy to throw, whereas a sandal thong would be so light that the slightest breeze would carry it off its path. Nevertheless, after prayers I would look around the courtyard outside, I decided, just to satisfy my curiosity.

  Actually, make that after dinner. I had been so keen to start work in the library that I had neglected to eat much breakfast and now my stomach was contributing a basso continuo during the singing of the psalm.

  Rats! The notion came to me halfway through eating a plum and caused me to jump, with the result that the plum flew across the table and left a nasty stain on Sister Angela’s apron as she filled my beaker. She was very good about it, and at least it had not stained her habit or headdress.

  I must explain. Thomas the handyman had heard rats scratching during the night, before the discovery of the thong’s disappearance. Rats can get into buildings through the tiniest gaps. Perhaps a rat had found its way into the treasury, discovered St Paul’s thong, and taken it home as a trophy. Or, even worse, eaten it. Hungry rats will eat almost anything, I believe. And while we were crawling around the floor looking for the thong I had seen some evidence of rodent droppings. If this was the case then I doubted that we would ever see the thong again.

  I was becoming quite excited at the thought that I had solved the mystery, when a little voice reminded me that I had absolutely no evidence for this fanciful notion. No rats had actually been seen. Now that I came to think of it, the droppings might just have been bits of dirt, no hole big enough for a rat had been seen, and I was bound to confess that no rat, however intelligent, was likely to have climbed up the cabinet and opened the door. For one to have grabbed the thong, that piece of leather would have had to fall out of its little box onto the floor. Since we had puzzled as to how someone had been dexterous enough to pull it out with a pair of tweezers, that seemed very unlikely, and I thought that we could discount any rodent having mastered the use of tweezers itself.

  The meal over, I made my way through the gate, which Sister Dorothea locked behind me, and then the carriage gate in the wall, which Thomas opened to admit me. From there I was able to make my way to the part of the wall where Thomas had thought he heard the scratching. I do not know what I expected to see, but there was no obvious hole in the wall.

  Seeing Thomas spurred me to a realisation that made me feel very stupid indeed. We had been proceeding on the assumption that the convent was utterly sealed, so that nobody could go in or out, and that seemed to be true. But I had seen Sister Perpetua and Thomas conduct a conversation through an open window, so what was to stop someone handing the thong to an accomplice outside the window?