A medieval friar wields unholy fire

April, you may recall, is when folks long to go on pilgrimages. If you slipped into a funny accent when you read that sentence, or - worse - it launched you on a recitation of many more strange lines, then you've studied "The Canterbury Tales."

Making us memorize Chaucer's Prologue was a favorite torture among my teachers. In graduate school, Dr. Carter Revard stood over me as I plodded through the medieval verse, interrupting on every word, sometimes every syllable, to correct my chronic mispronunciation. April was the cruelest month.

Natheless, even if Middle English left you in a muddle or you never studied it at all, you'll be fascinated by Peter Ackroyd's gripping new mystery, "The Clerkenwell Tales." Known primarily for his masterly, 800-page study of London, Ackroyd has now written a book that's nominally fiction and strikingly brief. (Look for his equally efficient biography of Chaucer in January.)

The story opens in 1399 at the House of Mary, a convent in Clerkenwell, London. After a brief illness, a young nun named Clarice has begun describing strange and violent visions. The prioress suspects it's all a stunt - just what she might expect from this scandalous girl who was conceived in the tunnels beneath the convent.

But the country is agitated and unsettled over the power struggle between King Richard II and Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV). Rumors of rebellion roil the populace. City leaders fret about unrest and wonder which side to support. An intractable nun making prophecies of plague and regicide could be the match that ignites a conflagration.

Touches of Middle English dialect flavor this narrative but never obscure it. With a nod to Chaucer, Ackroyd moves through 22 short tales, each named for a different character, some familiar from that legendary pilgrimage. (The Wife of Bath steals the show, again.) In this case, though, all the tales contribute to the same developing story about a crisis in London, and they're told about - not by - their title characters. The mystery builds up like a mosaic whose secret pattern the artist knows but won't tell till we can finally see it ourselves in the last pages.

When Sister Clarice cries out that "all the churches of England will be wrecked and wiped clean," she's merely adding her radical voice to an ongoing theological and political debate. But when she correctly predicts a series of terrorist acts in the city, she unsettles both her skeptics and her supporters. The problem (and pleasure, for us) is how to distinguish those two groups and figure out what plots these convoluted alliances are pursuing.

The nun's prescient ravings play right into the rebellious plans of Bolingbroke's friends in London who want to show how poorly King Richard protects the Church.

But a maniacal friar named William Exmewe seems just as interested in using Clarice for his own ends. He's secretly leading a group of radical purists known variously as "the true men," "the foreknown," or "the predestined ones."

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