The Perfect Sinner

The Perfect Sinner
Will Davenport

Discover a sumptuous and haunting novel of medieval loves, lies and loyalties.Slapton, Devon, 1372. Sir Guy de Bryan, trusted friend of Edward III, consecrates a magnificent Chantry, his personal bulwark against the torments of purgatory. Yet he is known as an honorable man. Why should he fear for his eternal soul?Sir Guy harbours three sins, violations of the chivalric code he holds so dear. The first, he has atoned for; he was more of a witness than perpetrator of the second; the third he cannot confess. Yet when he is called upon to lead a dangerous mission across the Alps, he finds one of his companions strangely interested in his tale. The young squire has an uncanny ability to draw out the truth…and in doing so, elicits a remarkable story of rivalry, murderous deception and deep passion.Over six hundred years later, high-flying policy adviser Beth Battock is forced to return to her home village in Devon when her prized career is rocked by scandal. Prompted by a local stone carver, who is painstakingly restoring the searing inscription once displayed on the Chantry, Beth must recognise her own history and that of her family, the thread that binds them to the de Bryans, and that the consequences of her actions cannot be divorced from what went before, in love and war.Will Davenport has taken a potent collection of historical facts and woven them into an astoundingly haunting and compelling novel. In medieval and modern times, mankind makes the same mistakes; but the words of a wise knight who lived it all, both politically and personally, have a clarity that resonates through the centuries.

The Perfect Sinner

Will Davenport

In memory of Tony Dixon who knew this story. The estuary wil always be his merchant.

In all his life to any, come what might He was a true, a perfect gentle-knight. Speaking of his equipment, he possessed Fine horses but he was not gaily dressed. He wore a fustian tunic stained and dark With smudges where his armour had left mark.

Geoffrey Chaucer.

Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.

Table of Contents

Cover Page (#u5af1b6df-5268-5300-b8ee-95c7cb6e5d15)

Title Page (#ue8d96ffc-9e54-5c4a-8bf4-f21c65594ab2)

Epigraph (#u5eb67541-6435-5eb9-974a-932e0bc893b6)

CHAPTER ONE (#u84476138-9c10-52d2-96d7-21ce4a926dcf)

CHAPTER TWO (#uae180c22-9402-5c37-8748-e9b84a08bbfb)

CHAPTER THREE (#u1a3a491a-1858-5e54-bfef-376cb965eec8)

CHAPTER FOUR (#ud62d3a0b-b949-5fae-8f5d-c25b02edf4b0)

CHAPTER FIVE (#u94d399a7-115d-553c-a18e-dbdfbf08b2eb)

CHAPTER SIX (#u7e8ebfea-f82b-508e-b784-228afc478c90)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

HISTORICAL NOTE (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgement (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Will Davenport (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_2b9109ab-875e-5368-9fc9-8df22b93ed73)

All my life I have been burdened with a good reputation. I do not deserve it. I will be ripped on the racks of Purgatory until the Day of Judgement for what I have done.

Do you know what that would be like? I’m not afraid of wounds and I have had plenty of them. In battle the pain arrives later and always passes in time. A man can stand that. To be burnt and torn and stabbed for a thousand ages is another thing entirely. The fear of it stalks in the animal form of my sin. It scratches at my door and leaps on me when I wake and I cannot keep it away. My three sins came one after the other, a year between the first two and then two years to the third. I have confessed the first of them and been given inadequate penance. I have tried to confess the second, but the priests will not see it my way. I have kept the third and greatest entirely to myself, saving it for my deathbed.

The worst of it is that my wife Elizabeth shared that first sin and in the long and lonely years since she died, I have feared for her even more than for myself. Time crawls by in Purgatory and the punishment there is dreadful.

Now, in this year of 1372, on the day of the consecration of my Chantry, I was given hope because I saw Elizabeth again. I looked up from where I was doing my stiff best to kneel in prayer and I saw her standing up there in the new stained glass blazing with sunlight. She was young again and she spoke with that angelic voice which always plucked directly at my heart and she used it to bring me a gift.