The Elixir of Death

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The last of the evening light was fading from the western sky when the stout wooden doors at Exeter's five gates were pushed shut by the porters and the great bars dropped into their sockets behind them. The two city constables began their patrol of the streets to make their token inspection, ensuring that all fires were extinguished or damped down for the night. The fear of a conflagration in a town whose houses were still largely built of wood was real, and the curfew or 'couvre-feu' was in tended to protect the citizens as they slept. In fact, many fires were kept going overnight to save relighting them for the early morning cooking, but as long as no obvious flames or glow were visible, the constables turned a blind eye.

When they left their hut behind the Guildhall, the fatter of the pair, Theobald, turned up High Street to tramp the lanes in the eastern part of the city. His skinny Saxon colleague, Osric, made his leisurely way in the opposite direction down Fore Street, his dim horn lantern in one hand, his staff in the other.

He greeted a few people as he went, though most respectable folk were at home, either finishing their supper or already in bed, as the working day corresponded largely with dawn and dusk. From side lanes in Bretayne to his right and Smythen Street and Stepcote Hill to his left came the distant sounds of raucous singing and swearing from the more disreputable alehouses such as the Saracen, but tonight was no different from any other, and Osric stepped out unconcernedly past little St Olave's church towards the West Gate.

Halfway down the hill, he heard rapid footsteps coming towards him and from force of habit tightened his grip on his ash stave and held his lantern higher, though its pale light hardly reached his feet.

'Is that you, Osric?' came a breathless voice, wheezing as he hurried up the slope. The constable recognised Matthew, one of the night porters from the West Gate, which led out to the ford and rickety footbridge over the river to the main highroad beyond.

'Matthew? What are doing away from your warm fire?' A portly man of middle age came into the circle of lantern light. He was dressed in a leather jerkin and incongruously wore a battered iron helmet as his badge of office.

'It's all right, Aelgard is on the gate. He sent me to fetch you. We need your advice.'

'Why? Have the French landed at Topsham to invade us?' Osric was only half joking, as in these uncertain times anything could happen.

'There's a man outside demanding to be let into the city, even though we shut the gates almost half an hour past.'

'Then tell him to go to hell — or come back in the morning.'

'He's very insistent. Come down and talk to him yourself. I don't want to get into trouble with the portreeves or the sheriff for either letting him in or keeping him out.'

Grumbling under his breath, the constable followed Matthew back to the lower town wall, which ran along the line of the river, with the boggy land of Exe Island in between. Aelgard, a younger man and a Saxon like himself, led him up the stone steps alongside one of the squat towers that flanked the gate. They reached the parapet fifteen feet above ground and peered over.

Though it was now virtually dark, a cloud moving off the horizon let through enough of the last streaks of grey light to make out a figure on a horse almost directly below them.

'It's after curfew, you can't come in now!' called Osric. There was a whinny and a clatter of hoofs as the rider turned his horse to face the voice.

'I have to, it's urgent. I've ridden since early morning. This is the second horse I've worn out to try to get here in time.'

'Who are you and what do you want?' yelled the constable.

'William Vado, bailiff of Ringmore, here on the orders of the lord of Totnes, through his steward. I have to speak straightway to the coroner or the sheriff.'

Impressed by the credentials of the rider and the urgency of his tone, Osric weakened a little.

'What do you want with the crowner at this time of night?'

'To report a murder most foul — and one which Sir John will want to hear about from my own lips!'

The constable decided that this was a situation out of the ordinary and capitulated.

'Very well, we'll admit you and I'll take you to him myself. But no tricks, d'you hear — or you'll regret it!'

Though his ears failed to burn at his name being taken in vain, at that moment the coroner was only a few hundred yards away from the West Gate. He was sitting in his usual place in the taproom of the Bush, a quart pot before him and an arm around Nesta's waist. Across the room, Gwyn was drinking and playing dice with a few of his cronies.

De Wolfe's long dark face was more morose than usual as he described the return of Matilda that day. For the third time he recounted to his mistress every word that had passed between him and his wife, until it was glaringly obvious to Nesta that his conscience was troubling him even more than usual.

'Are you quite sure you shouldn't return to the poor woman?' she asked softly, her natural compassion for an unhappy soul vying with her desire to have John for herself.

'Never!' blustered de Wolfe, with a conviction that deep within himself felt rather hollow. 'I've made the break and I'm standing by it. She does nothing but upbraid and insult me whenever I try to placate her.' At least this part was true, and he used Matilda's abrasive rejection of his attempts at reconciliation to bolster his own confidence.

Nesta sighed and laid her red curls on his solid shoulder.

'What's to become of us, John? I love having you here and feeling the warmth of your body against me, especially at night,' she murmured in Welsh. 'But I feel every eye upon us and hear every mouth whispering when they see us together. I care little for my sake, but I fear for your reputation and your position.'

'To hell with them, cariad!' he growled. 'We have been together for almost two years now, so every soul in Exeter and half those in the county of Devon knows about us — not least my wife.'

'But living together, John! That's different somehow.'

'Why should it be?' he protested. 'What difference is there if we make love in the afternoon to making love at midnight?'

Nesta pulled away a little and shook her head at him. 'You are such a direct, practical man, John,' she said sadly. 'But a woman knows there is a difference. Being here all the time, forsaking your own home and hearth and turning your back on your wife, means a commitment far greater than a quick fumble when the chance presents.'

He looked down at her pretty face, a scowl trying to conceal his deep affection for her. 'Are you trying to talk me into going home, wench?' he growled. 'Have you tired of me so quickly?'

Little worms of doubt wriggled in both their minds, to be stamped upon ruthlessly. For Nesta's part, though she adored this big, gruff man, for several years past she had become used to living independently. Now, though he was hardly 'under her feet' all day, she felt obliged to sit with him as much as possible in the evenings, keeping him company when she should have been bustling about the tavern, attending to her business.

John loved sitting with her, slipping his hand around her to caress her and looking forward to climbing the ladder to her little room every night. But he missed his gossiping with Mary in the kitchen shed, fondling and talking to his old dog Brutus — and even yearned for the peaceful hours when he could doze in front of his hearth with a pot of cider.

Just as their talk threatened to become too serious, the awkward moment was broken by a sudden scuffle at the back of the taproom, a squeal from one of the serving maids and the crash of an ale jug as it fell upon a table.

'Bloody men!' snapped Nesta, jumping up to give a carter who had drunk too much the length of her tongue and scold him out of the back door until he had sobered up. John had learned not to interfere unless things got out of hand, as Nesta's powerful personality, often aided by a few of her admiring patrons, was usually more than equal to every occasion.

However, as she was haranguing the carter and pushing him towards the yard, another interruption came through the front door. The lanky shape of Osric bobbed his head under the lintel, closely followed by a shorter figure swathed in a dusty riding cloak. The coroner looked up in surprise.

'Bailiff! What the devil are you doing here?'

The two men dropped heavily on to the bench on the other side of his table. William Vado looked exhausted, and John shouted at old Edwin to bring some mulled ale to warm the bailiff. As the constable began to explain what had happened at the gate, Nesta hurried back, and as soon as she had gathered who the new arrival was, she sent a serving girl off to get some hot food for him. By now, Gwyn had been attracted by the arrival of the man from Ringmore and came over to stand listening at the table.

' … so I thought it best to open the gates for him, Crowner,' concluded Osric. 'He said he knew you and that he had come on the authority of the lord of Totnes.'

De Wolfe nodded impatiently, and as soon as Vado had gratefully taken a long pull at his warmed ale, he demanded to hear his news.

'Another killing, Sir John, a real nasty one!' he began. 'When you were in Ringmore last, you told us about the death of that manor-lord near Exeter here — the one who was beheaded.'

John stared at him incredulously. 'Was this a beheading too? Who was killed, for St Peter's sake?'

William Vado shook his head. 'Not beheaded, Crowner. But you said the lord was sort of crucified and this poor man was lashed to a branch by his wrists, then hung by his neck from a tree! It was Joel, the old hermit from Burgh Island.'

De Wolfe and Gwyn recalled the cadaverous recluse who had heard the dying sailor mention 'Saracens'.

'But he was a harmless old fellow, surely?' exclaimed John. 'Not worth robbing and surely no threat to anyone!'

'You say he was hanged from a tree?' boomed Gwyn. The bailiff quaffed from his pot again before answering. 'Yes, but I doubt that killed him. He was covered in blood and had many knife wounds upon his body.'

More details came out bit by bit, as William related how, soon after dawn, one of the fisherfolk on his way to the beach smelt smoke. He soon found the hermit dangling from a tree, with a small fire still smouldering on the ground directly under the corpse, though there seemed little damage from the flames apart from some roasting of the feet.

'Bloody strange!' growled Gwyn. 'What's going on in our county these days?'

'At least Peter le Calve and his sons were Norman gentry,' muttered John. 'But this Joel was just some old anchorite, of little account except to God and himself.' A steaming bowl of mutton stew arrived in front of the bailiff, but before he attacked it with his spoon, he looked up at the coroner.

'I wouldn't hasten to dismiss Joel as of no account, Sir John. No one knows much about him, except perhaps our parish priest, who took his confessions, but years ago there was a rumour that he came from a noble family before he renounced the world to live on that island.'

Between dipping a hunk of rough bread into his stew and chewing at it appreciatively, William Vado explained how the fisherman had hurried to Ringmore to report the murder. The bailiff had sent his reeve and some other men to safeguard the body, having learned from the previous episode that the coroner wanted everything left undisturbed. He had taken his horse and ridden hard to Totnes, where he had been given some food and a fresh gelding to get him to Exeter as soon as possible. Thanks to the dry roads, he had made the marathon journey of thirty miles in one day, just failing to reach the city before curfew.

When he had eaten, de Wolfe arranged with Nesta to give him a straw mattress and a blanket up in the loft and, tired to the point of collapse, William gratefully hauled himself up the ladder.

'Remember, we leave at dawn!' shouted John after him, and with fresh jars of ale and cider before them, he and Gwyn sat with Nesta to discuss this latest act in the drama of the mysterious deaths.

'This crucifixion thing,' began the Cornishman. 'Thomas must be right in thinking it must be an unChristian abomination. That must surely mean Saracens.'

'But why now and in a remote English county?' asked Nesta. 'There's no crusading going on that must be avenged.'

'It's quiet out in Palestine, I'll agree,' mused John. 'The King negotiated a long peace with Saladin through the Treaty of Jaffa, though skirmishing never stops out there.'

'And Saladin died more than two years ago,' added Gwyn. 'So I don't see why some Saracens should turn up here and randomly start killing us.'

John shook his head. 'I'll wager it's not random. There's some reason for it, though I'm damned if I can see what it might be.'

They talked on to little effect for some time. To be truthful, John and Nesta were secretly glad that their unhappy heart-searching about Matilda and their own emotional dilemma had been diverted by this news from the far west of Devon. Eventually, mindful of an early start and a long day on horseback ahead of them, the coroner and his officer finished their ale and Gwyn left for Rougemont, where he often found a place to sleep with his soldier friends. They had agreed to let Thomas carry on with his own business, as though his horsemanship had improved since he had given up the side-saddle, he was still an encumbrance when they needed to ride far and fast.

John took himself up to Nesta's small chamber in the loft, passing a snoring William Vado on the way. De Wolfe intended lying awake in anticipation of Nesta's warm body joining him after she had attended to various tasks in the cook shed and brew-house, but when she finally came to bed, he was peacefully asleep. With an affectionate smile, she crept in beside him and snuggled up close, uncaring for at least one night as to what the future might hold for them.

The coroner's return to the banks of the River Avon was not quite as swift as the bailiff's ride to Exeter. His destrier Odin was built for endurance rather than speed and this applied in lesser measure to Gwyn's big brown mare. They got further than Totnes on the first day and slept on the floor of an alehouse in a hamlet a few miles farther south. After another early start, by mid-morning they were at Aveton Giffard, at the head of the Avon estuary. William Vado took them on a track alongside the river which was only passable at low tide, bringing them out near where Thorgils' ship had been moored on their last visit.

'The corpse is just a bit farther on,' promised the bailiff, pointing to a swath of trees along the steep side of the western bank. A few minutes later, they saw a small group of men waiting for them, some recognisable as having been at the inquest in Ringmore. Sliding gratefully from their horses and rubbing their aching bottoms, John and his officer followed Vado into the wood, where gnarled and spindly trees, most covered with grey-green lichen and moss, gave the lonely place a mystical air.

They followed a faint track through the fallen leaves, the river still visible down to their left, until they reached an area where the trees were more widely spaced. Here they came upon a grotesque and pathetic sight which was even more weird than their imaginations had led them to expect.

Hanging by the neck from a branch of an old oak was a thin, naked body. There was a slight breeze and the corpse turned eerily from side to side as if scanning the scenery with open, sightless eyes. It was not very high above the ground, the feet hovering barely a yard over the remains of a small fire, where the unburnt ends of a ring of small logs projected from a heap of grey ash.

As with Peter le Calve, the arms were kept outstretched by being lashed by the wrists to a length of dead branch passing behind the shoulders, though there were also lashings around each armpit to keep the branch in place. Again like the dead manor-lord, the chest was disfigured by stab wounds, though this time they were many more in number. There were also some on the belly, dribbles of dried blood streaking the skin below each stab.

For a moment, the new arrivals stared in silence at the horrific scene.

'At least he's not been disembowelled or castrated,' grunted Gwyn, as if this were something to the dead man's advantage.

'But he's just as bloody dead!' snarled de Wolfe. 'Poor old sod. Why do this to a harmless hermit?'

There was no answer to this, and they moved nearer for a closer look.

John noticed some scraps of part-burned cloth at the edge of the dead fire.

'That must be the remains of his clothing,' he grunted. 'Even in death they had to further humiliate the old man by stripping him naked!'

Gwyn was looking up rather than down, and nudged his master.

'No need to ponder if this is connected with Shillingford, Crowner! Look at those lashings and the cord around his neck.'

The coroner followed his officer's gaze and nodded. 'More red silk. And I'll wager two marks that those stab wounds are far wider than usual.'

De Wolfe felt nauseated by the evil nature of this killing. Though he had seen far worse mutilations in battle, this cold-blooded perversity both sickened and infuriated him.

'Cut the poor old devil down!' he snapped. 'He's suffered enough indignity.'

As Gwyn and Osbert the reeve supported the frail body, one of the younger men shinned up the tree and clambered out along the branch to cut through the thin but strong cord that was knotted over it.

'We left him there for you to see, Crowner,' said William Vado apologetically. 'There were those in the village who said it wasn't seemly to leave him hanging for two days, but in the circumstances I thought I'd best abide by your rules.'

'It's a dilemma, with Exeter so far away,' admitted John, with uncharacteristic sympathy. 'But you did right, Bailiff, we need all the information we can get to catch these bastards.'

'But where do we start?' growled Gwyn pessimistically. 'Have any strangers been seen around here?' demanded John of the bailiff.

Vado shook his head. 'This is a lonely spot, sir. Even the river fishermen rarely come up from the water's edge. Who's to see any strangers?'

They paused as Gwyn and the reeve went forward to gently take the victim's body as the lad finished cutting through the silken cord. The old hermit was laid on the ground away from the fire, and one of the men took off his ragged cape and laid it over the anchorite's body, a simple act of compassion that was not lost on the coroner.

'When was he last seen alive?' he asked.

'I saw him the day before he went missing,' volunteered one of the fishermen. 'About noon, it was. He was up on the top of his hut, looking out to sea. He does that for us, scanning the water for shoals.'

'Why should he be here?' boomed Gwyn. 'I was wondering whether he was brought here forcibly or whether he was ambushed.'

'Old Joel used to wander the woods looking for fallen branches for his fire,' said the reeve. 'I know this was one of the places he came for that.'

De Wolfe looked around as if for inspiration, but all he saw was the silent trees. If only they could speak, he thought whimsically.

'There are no horse tracks here. Whoever did this must have come on foot,' observed the bailiff.

'No mysterious hooded monks this time?' said John bitterly. This was a mystery with no clues, as far as he was concerned. They watched as the youth with the knife cut the cords holding Joel's arms to the crucifying branch and allowed the dead limbs to be pushed against his side.

'The death stiffness is passing off,' said Gwyn. 'That fits with him dying more than a couple of days ago.' He knelt down alongside the pathetic figure of the old man and gently pulled back the cape to look at Joel's face and trunk. The coroner came to bend over him, hands on knees.

'He didn't die of hanging, anyway,' commented John. 'His face isn't discoloured and there's no swelling around the cord on his neck.'

'Doesn't have to be like that, though I agree it usually is,' said Gwyn, unwilling to be overshadowed in his knowledge of violent death, even by his master.

De Wolfe pointed to some of the stab wounds, which, as he had prophesied, were seen on closer inspection to be very wide.

'The blood dribbling from some of them show he was lying down when they bled, not hanging from a tree.' This time even Gwyn failed to argue, just nodded his head. He turned the body over and looked at several similar wounds on the back.

'Ten wounds all told, including those on his belly. Only one is needed to kill, so why inflict all these?'

'Does that mean the killers were in some sort of frenzy?' asked the bailiff.

John shrugged. 'Could be — though I've known of some cruel bastards stabbing a man many times just for the pleasure of it.'

Gwyn collected up the cut cords and stuffed them into the shapeless pouch on his belt. 'I'll keep these to add to the others. You never know, maybe we can match them with something if we catch these swine.'

There seemed nothing further to do in the wood, so John told Vado that they would take the body back to Ringmore.

'This is in your manor, I presume?' he asked, looking around.

The bailiff nodded. 'Only just. The boundary with Bigbury is over there.' He waved a hand vaguely. 'No use expecting them to do anything, anyway! They don't have a resident bailiff, he's in Aveton — and their reeve is a drunken idiot.'

They set off through the trees in the opposite direction to which they had come, moving down the side of the estuary towards the sea. The path was narrow and they had to thread their way through the trees, leading their horses by the reins. When they came out of the woods, it was about noon and the tide was in, so John's intention to go on to Burgh Island to look at Joel's hermitage was frustrated. They rounded the point and were able to mount their horses again for the mile or so to the village, leaving the others to tramp in their own time with the skinny body, which four men carried between them, a limb each.

In the old manor-house of Ringmore, William Vado soon organised food and drink and afterwards they sat around the fire-pit in rather muted mood, saddened by the apparently senseless murder of a penniless recluse.

'How long has this Joel been here?' asked Gwyn. 'Since I was a child, and that's more than twenty years ago,' answered William. 'I don't remember him coming.' The reeve, Osbert de Newetone, was a decade older and recalled Joel's arrival.

'He just walked into the village one day. Autumn, it was, a real good harvest year. He wore a plain tunic and a pilgrim's hat, was bare-foot and carried a pilgrim's staff. He kept those clothes for years until they fell to pieces. Then someone in the village gave him the cast-offs he wore to this day.'

'And you know nothing of where he came from?' persisted the coroner.

The bailiff turned up his hands. 'He never said and it wasn't our place to ask. But he spoke well, and he could read words on parchment when someone needed to. I don't remember where this story came from about him being a former nobleman or knight, but I could quite believe it.'

'How did he come to settle on that island?' queried

Gwyn, sucking ale from his moustache.

'When he arrived, he said he was a looking for a place of solitude to live out his life, praise God and atone for his sins,' said Osbert. 'The loneliest place we could think of was the island of St Michael de la Burgh. Our priest said there was no reason to object, so off he went and built that hut.'

Further questioning produced nothing useful, and when they had finished their ale and warmed up by the fire, John and Gwyn reluctantly shrugged on their riding capes and followed the local men outside, where the overcast sky was threatening snow or sleet, though at the moment it was dry, but with a biting east wind.

As they trudged up the road, John turned to the bailiff. 'I suppose your Father Walter will have housed the corpse in the barn again,' he said cynically.

To his mild surprise, Vado shook his head. 'When I told him what had happened, he said that as a solitary hermit and a man of God, he was entitled to be laid before the altar until we buried him.'

When they got to the tiny church, they found that this was indeed the case. The mortal remains of Joel, draped in a rather grubby linen sheet which was probably a spare altar-cloth, lay on a rough bier in the centre of the square room where God was worshipped in Ringmore.

'We'll have to carry him out for the inquest,' said John. 'It's not seemly to expose his wounded body to the jury in here.' It was too cold and windy to hold the formalities in the churchyard, so a couple of men carried the corpse table by its handles over to the tithe barn.

Most of the men from the village, together with a few fisherfolk from the beach, formed an audience and a jury. John and Gwyn went through the usual routine, but when the coroner came to determine 'Presentment of Englishry', Father Walter interrupted him.

'I would speak to you alone for a moment, Crowner,' he demanded in a tone that anticipated no refusal. John walked over to the doorway, where the sour-faced priest had been watching the proceedings with apparent indifference.

'From what I saw at your last inquisition here, this 'presentment' business seems aimed at distinguishing Saxons from those of mainly Norman blood?'

'It does indeed,' said de Wolfe. 'But in this case, his very name and the fact that he can read and write must indicate that he is unlikely to be a Saxon peasant.'

The florid-faced priest nodded, the bags under his slightly bloodshot eyes sagging like those of some old bloodhound. He looked around at his flock in the barn and nudged John farther towards the open air, to be out of their hearing. 'I can certainly confirm that,' he said in a low voice. 'Now that he is dead, I am not so concerned about keeping too strictly to the sanctity of the confessional. At least I can tell you his true name and something of his origins.'

The coroner waited expectantly. Any information would be welcome, rather than the void that seemed to surround these deaths.

'He would have been seventy years old at his death, calculating from what he told me some years ago. Joel's full name was Sir Joel de Valle Torta, from a noble family with estates in Normandy and Essex. He had been a Knight Templar many years earlier.'

De Wolfe uttered a low whistle of surprise. 'A Templar! Usually, once a Templar, always a Templar. How came he to be living in obscurity on a rock stuck in the sea?'

'I cannot reveal much of the detail, even after his death. But he said that his sins weighed so heavily upon him that he received a special dispensation to leave the Order to become an anchorite, cutting himself off from the world.'

'Then his sins must indeed have been unusually vile! Can you tell me what they might have been? It may have a bearing upon his murder.'

Father Waiter pondered for a moment, as if communing with some higher authority — which he may well have been doing.

'It must suffice to say that it concerned his behaviour as a soldier. He came to confession regularly and it was always the same lament — his overwhelming guilt for his own actions in warfare. He was ever penitent and sought absolution. '

The coroner instinctively felt that this was important in understanding the man's death, so he pressed the parish priest harder.

'In which campaigns would he have served? There were bloody episodes in so many, from Ireland to Jerusalem. '

Then he had a sudden thought. 'But he has been here for over twenty years, so he could not have been with us in the last attempt in the Holy Land. Acre was the place where so many men have had cause for guilty consciences over the foul deeds that took place there.'

The heavily built vicar grunted. 'All I can tell you is that the cause of his anguish was indeed in Outremer — but long ago, for he was at the Second Crusade. That's all I know — at least, that's all I can tell you.'

The way his fleshy lips clamped shut indicated that no amount of persuasion would make him say more, but John was satisfied — though still mystified.

'The Second Crusade! The link that joins all these deaths!' he murmured.

As Father Walter swung away with an air of finality, John went back to complete the short inquest. Though it displayed the usual frustrating pattern of the previous enquiries into this series of killings, he left Ringmore with much to think about and to discuss with Thomas and Gwyn.

Two days later, the trio were breaking their fast in the cheerless room above the gatehouse in Exeter's castle. The cathedral bell was tolling for Prime, just before the eighth hour of the morning, and Gwyn was finishing a pork pasty, before tackling his bread and cheese.

Thomas had not long come from his early chantry Mass and was sitting at the table, preparing a palimpsest, a second-hand sheet of parchment. After scraping off the original writing, he was sanding and chalking it, ready to write a record of the Ringmore inquest, whenever the coroner was ready to dictate. But John was in a contemplative mood as he chewed on a strip of dried salt beef, which looked like leather. At least it gave him a thirst, which he quenched at intervals from a pint pot sitting in front of him.

'Thomas, you are a man of considerable intellect. Give us the benefit of that sharp mind of yours!'

The little clerk was unsure whether his master was being complimentary or sarcastic, but decided on the former. His peaky face creased into a smile of pride.

'On what, exactly, Crowner? he asked, putting aside his parchment and rubbing his thin fingers together to rid them of the chalk dust.

'We have three dead men and one more injured, the only connection between them that I can see being the Second Crusade. Peter le Calve's father and this Templar, Joel, were actually there — and the steward of Shillingford and the injured son were part of the le Calve household. Is that just a coincidence, Thomas?'

The clerk pursed his lips in thought, but before he could reply, Gwyn interrupted.

'This damned Second Crusade — before my time. What was it all about?'

The teacher in Thomas leapt to the challenge. 'Giving such numbers to Crusades is unrealistic, really. God's war against the enemies of Christ goes on all the time — there's always fighting somewhere against the unbelievers. But yes, the ones where kings and princes get involved — or there's a major disaster — they tend to get numbered.'

'All I've ever heard is that this second one was a disaster, right enough,' grunted the Cornishman.

'Many of those who set off from the West never reached the Holy Land, as far as I remember,' said the coroner. 'Didn't they go off marauding on the way? And many more were wiped out on the journey?'

Thomas nodded energetically, his great store of knowledge bursting to be free. 'Many of the German army never even got out of Europe — they found wars to fight and cities to loot on the way.'

'What's this got to do with our killings here?' muttered Gwyn suspiciously.

'If this old Crusader, Joel, was so conscience-ridden that he sat on Burgh Island for twenty years, he must have been involved in something really bad,' observed John. 'What happened that could have been so awful? Something like Acre in the last Crusade?'

Thomas tapped his fingers excitedly on the trestle table. 'Damascus! I'll wager it was Damascus.'

The other two waited, impressed by their clerk's grasp of history, recently enlarged by his readings in the cathedral library.

'That's what caused the Crusade to collapse, the last straw in a catalogue of mistakes. Two kings answered the call to arms by Pope Eugenius and St Bernard of Clairvaux after the Mohammedans captured the city of Edessa. One was Louis of France and the other Conrad of Germany.'

'Didn't the English turn out for that one?' asked Gwyn.

'The country was too concerned with civil war then, between Stephen and Matilda. Quite a big English contingent set off from Dartmouth, but stopped for months in Portugal to kick out the Moors. That was about the only successful campaign in the whole Crusade.'

'So what's this about Damascus?' snapped de Wolfe. 'It was the final fiasco, both political and military. The two kings decided to besiege it, but their forces were so depleted and their tactics were so bad that they had to abandon the attempt after only three days. In their humiliating retreat, they inflicted terrible revenge and bloodshed on the surrounding inhabitants. I suspect that was the most likely source of the hermit's guilt.'

'This was all of forty-seven years ago,' objected Gwyn. 'None of us was even born then.'

'But Joel was! He would have been a lusty young fighter of twenty-three, if he was seventy when he died,' Thomas pointed out. 'And old Arnulf le Calve would have been about the same age.'

'As would Gervaise, Richard de Revelle's father!' added John.

The other two looked at him, puzzled looks on their faces.

'But his son's not been murdered, more's the pity,' rumbled Gwyn.

'No, but Peter le Calve's son was shot at — and no doubt the poor steward was mistaken for the other son,' retorted John.

There was a thoughtful silence as they pondered this until, as usual, the phlegmatic Gwyn acted as the brake on their enthusiasm.

'Hold on, wait a moment!' he grumbled. 'This is almost half a century ago, for God's sake! And we're halfway across the world from where it happened.'

He tore a piece of bread from the loaf on his lap and used his dagger to cut a wedge of hard yellow cheese to accompany it, still not convinced that all this speculation would help them discover who had killed Thorgils and the others. 'I still don't see what we can do about it! Who are the swine going to attack next?'

His officer's last question caused the coroner to feel a niggle of worry gnawing away at his mind. If this theory about vengeful Saracens was right, then they had dispatched a knight who had been in the Levant at the time of that ill-fated Crusade — and had killed the son of another, going on to wound a grandson and slaying his steward, probably by mistake. If this really was a blood feud involving the families of the perpetrators of some ancient evil, then what about the de Revelles? Old Gervaise had long been in his grave, safely beyond revenge — but if the pattern of murder was to be repeated, then was his family at risk? John cared little about Richard de Revelle, but in spite of everything he was certainly concerned about Matilda, the daughter of Gervaise.

Abruptly, he shook off the spiral of worry that had descended upon him. For God's sake, he thought, he was sitting in Exeter on a cold Monday morning, in a castle with four score men-at arms near by. His wife was either safely at home or among her friends in St Olave's church or the cathedral. This idea about secretive Saracen killers slinking about, intent on murder most foul, was surely a fantasy.

'You're probably right, Gwyn,' he conceded. 'We're letting our imaginations run away with us. But I'd still like to find the evil bastards who did this. I'm sure the answer lies out west, somewhere around Ringmore.'