He told, or confirmed that he had told during the night, a part of that story I had already pieced together: his wanderings as a Fraticello, Shepherd, and Pseudo Apostle; and how in the days of Fra Dolcino he met Remigio among the Dolcinians and escaped with him, following the Battle of Monte Rebello, taking refuge after various ups and downs in the Casale convent.
Further, he added that the heresiarch Dolcino, near defeat and capture, had entrusted to Remigio certain letters, to be carried he did not know where or to whom. And Remigio always carried those letters with him, never daring to deliver them, and on his arrival at the abbey, afraid of keeping them on his person but not wanting to destroy them, he entrusted them to the librarian, yes, to Malachi, who was to hide them somewhere in the recesses of the Aedificium.
As Salvatore spoke, the cellarer was looking at him with hatred, and at a certain point he could not restrain himself from shouting, “Snake, lascivious monkey, I was your father, friend, shield, and this is how you repay me!”
Salvatore looked at his protector, now in need of protection, and answered, with an effort, “Lord Remigio, while I could be, I was your man. And you were to me dilectissimo. But you know the chief constable’s family. Qui non habet caballum vadat cum pede. . . .”
“Madman!” Remigio shouted at him again. “Are you hoping to save yourself? You too will die, you know? Say that you spoke under torture; say you invented it all!”
“What do I know, lord, what all these heresias are called. . . . Patarini, gazzesi, leoniste, arnaldiste, speroniste, circoncisi . . . I am not homo literatus. I sinned with no malicia, and Signor Bernardo Magnificentissimo knows it, and I am hoping in his indulgencia in nomine patre et filio et spiritis sanctis . . .”
“We shall be indulgent insofar as our office allows,” the inquisitor said, “and we shall consider with paternal benevolence the good will with which you have opened your spirit. Go now, go and meditate further in your cell, and trust in the mercy of the Lord. Now we must debate a question of quite different import. So, then, Remigio, you were carrying with you some letters from Dolcino, and you gave them to your brother monk who is responsible for the library. . . .”
“That is not true, not true!” the cellarer cried, as if such a defense could still be effective. And, rightly, Bernard interrupted him: “But you are not the one who must confirm this: it is Malachi of Hildesheim.”
He had the librarian called, but Malachi was not among those present. I knew he was either in the scriptorium or near the infirmary, seeking Benno and the book. They went to fetch him, and when he appeared, distraught, trying to look no one in the face, William muttered with dismay, “And now Benno is free to do what he pleases.” But he was mistaken, because I saw Benno’s face peep up over the shoulders of the other monks crowding around the door of the hall, to follow the interrogation. I pointed him out to William. We thought that Benno’s curiosity about what was happening was even stronger than his curiosity about the book. Later we learned that, by then, he had already concluded an ignoble bargain of his own.
Malachi appeared before the judges, his eyes never meeting those of the cellarer.
“Malachi,” Bernard said, “this morning, after Salvatore’s confession during the night, I asked you whether you had received from the defendant here present any letters. . . .”
“Malachi!” the cellarer cried. “You swore you would do nothing to harm me!”
Malachi shifted slightly toward the defendant, to whom his back was turned, and said in a low voice, which I could barely hear, “I did not swear falsely. If I could have done anything to harm you, it was done already. The letters were handed over to Lord Bernard this morning, before you killed Severinus. . . .”
“But you know, you must know. I didn’t kill Severinus! You know because you were there before me!”
“I?” Malachi asked. “I went in there after they discovered you.”
“Be that as it may,” Bernard interrupted, “what were you looking for in Severinus’s laboratory, Remigio?”
The cellarer turned to William with dazed eyes, then looked at Malachi, then at Bernard again. “But this morning I . . . I heard Brother William here present tell Severinus to guard certain papers . . . and since last night, since Salvatore was captured, I have been afraid those letters—”
“Then you know something about those letters!” Bernard cried triumphantly. The cellarer at this point was trapped. He was caught between two necessities: to clear himself of the accusation of heresy, and to dispel the suspicion of murder. He must have decided to face the second accusation—instinctively, because by now he was acting by no rule, and without counsel. “I will talk about the letters later. . . . I will explain . . . I will tell how they came into my possession. . . .
But let me tell what happened this morning. I thought there would be talk of those letters when I saw Salvatore fall into the hands of Lord Bernard; for years the memory of those letters has been tormenting my heart. . . . Then when I heard William and Severinus speaking of some papers . . . I cannot say . . . overcome with fear, I thought Malachi had got rid of them and given them to Severinus. . . . I wanted to destroy them and so I went to Severinus. . . . The door was open and Severinus was already dead, I started searching through his things for the letters. . . . I was just afraid. . . .”
William whispered into my ear, “Poor fool, fearing one danger, he has plunged headlong into another. . . .”
“Let us assume that you are telling almost—I say, almost—the truth,” Bernard intervened. “You thought Severinus had the letters and you looked for them in his laboratory. And why did you think he had them? Why did you first kill the other brothers? Did you perhaps think those letters had for some time been passing through many hands? Is it perhaps customary in this abbey to gather relics of burned heretics?”
I saw the abbot start. Nothing could be more insidious than an accusation of collecting relics of heretics, and Bernard was very sly in mixing the murders with heresy, and everything with the life of the abbey. I was interrupted in my reflections by the cellarer, who was shouting that he had nothing to do with the other crimes. Bernard indulgently calmed him: this, for the moment, was not the question they were discussing, Remigio was being interrogated for a crime of heresy, and he should not attempt (and here Bernard’s voice became stern) to draw attention away from his heretical past by speaking of Severinus or trying to cast suspicion on Malachi. So he should therefore return to the letters.
“Malachi of Hildesheim,” he said, addressing the witness. “You are not here as a defendant. This morning you answered my questions and my request with no attempt to hide anything. Now you will repeat here what you said to me this morning, and you will have nothing to fear.”
“I repeat what I said this morning,” Malachi said. “A short time after Remigio arrived up here, he began to take charge of the kitchen, and we met frequently for reasons connected with our duties—as librarian, I am charged with shutting up the whole Aedificium at night, and therefore also the kitchen. I have no reason to deny that we became close friends, nor had I any reason to harbor suspicions of this man. He told me that he had with him some documents of a secret nature, entrusted to him in confession, which should not fall into profane hands and which he dared not keep himself.
Since I was in charge of the only part of the monastery forbidden to all the others, he asked me to keep those papers, far from any curious gaze, and I consented, never suspecting the documents were of a heretical nature, nor did I even read them as I placed them . . . I placed them in the most inaccessible of the secret rooms of the library, and after that I forgot this matter, until this morning, when the lord inquisitor mentioned the papers to me, and then I fetched them and handed them over to him. . . .”
The abbot, frowning, took the floor. “Why did you not inform me of this agreement of yours with the cellarer? The library is not intended to house things belonging to the monks!” The abbot had made it clear that the abbey had no connection with this business.
“My lord,” Malachi answered, confused, “it seemed to me a thing of scarce importance. I sinned without malice.”
“Of course, of course,” Bernard said, in a cordial tone, “we are all convinced the librarian acted in good faith, and his frankness in
