The Poisoned Chalice

Chapter Seven In which Crowner John is summoned to a corpse

Next morning, John stood moodily in front of the smouldering fire in the hall. Mary had given him his breakfast, which he ate in solitary state soon after dawn. Then, still in his bed shirt, he went out to the back yard and washed his face and neck in a bucket of water: it was Saturday morning, the day for ablutions. He had the second of his twice-weekly shaves, rubbing his face with soap made from goat’s fat and beech ash boiled with soda, then rasped at his black stubble with a special knife, its edge honed to extreme sharpness. It was also the day to change his clothes, and Mary had put out a clean long undershirt and a grey tunic for him which he pulled over his head, after warming them before the fire.

He dragged on his braies, trousers that came to the knee, and then long stockings, over which he wound cross-gartering. His clothes were almost devoid of ornamentation or embroidery, merely a few lines of stitches around the high neck. He was not riding that day, so put on low shoes, pointed but without the extravagant curled tips in the new fashion that dandies like de Revelle and Fitzosbern sported.

‘It’s cold out, that wind never ceases,’ advised Mary, holding out a clean super-tunic in black woollen serge.

‘What was she like last night, after I left?’ he muttered to his maid and former bed-mate.

Mary’s eyes lifted to the small embrasure high above them that communicated with the solar, where Matilda was still in bed. ‘She stayed here an hour, poking the fire so hard it almost went out!’ she whispered conspiratorially. ‘Then she yelled for Lucille and they went up to her solar. She’s not moved since.’

John knew that, for he had spent the night on the further edge of their large palliasse, Matilda ignoring him in a pretence of sleep. ‘She’ll come round, it’s not so bad as last month.’ Then his wife had barred the solar door against him for several nights, making him sleep on the floor of the hall before the fire.

After dressing, John intended to go up to Rougemont for the eighth bell, to be present when Richard de Revelle interrogated the two silversmiths, as he had threatened the previous evening. But Fate, that unpredictable meddler, took a hand in his plans. She arrived in the form of Gwyn of Polruan who, just as John was taking his cloak from a peg in the vestibule, banged on the outer door and pushed in from the lane outside. The east wind had brought the first flurries of snow and his tattered leather jerkin was spotted with white.

‘What’s this, man?’ demanded John. ‘You’re usually up in the gate-house at this hour, feeding that great stomach of yours.’

The Cornishman brushed flakes of snow from his wide shoulders. ‘More trouble. We’ve got a body in the city. I don’t like the looks of this one.’

Over many years, John had learned to heed Gwyn’s warnings. Long before they had become involved in his work as coroner, Gwyn’s mixture of common sense and Celtic intuition had so often proved correct, whether it was on the field of battle or lost in some god-forsaken forest or desert.

The coroner hung his cloak back on the peg and motioned Gwyn to come into the hall. He yelled down the passageway for Mary, then led the way to his hearth.

Gwyn, who rarely came to the house, looked about him silently at the large room, the high rafters and the table and chairs. John knew he was comparing this affluence with his own thatched hut of wattle and daub in St Sidwell’s, but he felt that Gwyn was not in the slightest envious, only curious as to how the other half lived.

Mary bustled in and nodded pleasantly at the whiskered giant – they always got on well together, both practical, no-nonsense characters. John asked her to bring bread, cheese and ale to compensate Gwyn for his missed breakfast – he seemed unable to survive a morning without a top-up of food and drink.

His officer declined an invitation to sit in his master’s house, but stood near the fire to melt the last of the snowflakes. John waited expectantly, knowing that Gwyn would take his time. ‘A woman’s body, found less than an hour ago, in St Bartholomew’s churchyard,’ he began. This was one of the many small parish chapels dotted about the city, St Bartholomew’s being in the drab quarter between the North and West Gates.

‘Who found it?’

‘An old crone who sweeps out the chapel. She arrived soon after dawn and saw a pair of feet sticking out from a rubbish pile just inside the gate.’

‘Have you been there yourself?’

‘I had a quick look, but touched nothing. The old woman told the priest and he sent word to the castle. I happened to be there when his servant came to the gate-house guard with the message.’

‘Does the sheriff know about it yet?’

Gwyn delayed answering as Mary arrived with a wooden platter of food and a jug of ale. She looked enquiringly at John, but he shook his head, having not long had his breakfast.

‘I doubt the sheriff knows – he’s too busy with the visit of Hubert Walter to bother about a corpse.’

‘Any idea who the dead woman might be?’

Gwyn shrugged as he gulped down his food – he knew he would have little time to finish it. ‘Most of the body is hidden under old sticks and leaves – the midden is used for ashes from the priest’s house fire, as well as trashings from around the churchyard.’

‘It has been deliberately hidden, you think?’

Gwyn nodded his great head, his massive jaw champing away. ‘Only the feet and lower legs can be seen,’ he said, through a mouthful of bread, ‘but they are a woman’s and the shoes are stylish and of fine leather.’

‘Anything else?’

‘There’s blood under the calves, that I could see.’

John groaned. ‘Holy Christ, let it not be another rape – with murder added this time!’

He made for the vestibule and took down his cloak again. Throwing it over his shoulders, he pulled one corner of the square garment through a large bronze ring sewn over his left collarbone, then tied the end in a knot to hold it in place. ‘Drink that ale down and bring your cheese in your hand.’

He dived out into the cold morning and strode away, oblivious of the increasing snowflakes that drifted on the wind.

‘Did you raise the hue and cry?’ John demanded of the parish priest of St Bartholomew.

The portly man nodded impatiently. ‘Of course! When the old woman told me, I sent my man off directly to find either you or the sheriff at the castle. Then two of my neighbours alongside the churchyard came out to see what was going on. I told them to knock up all the householders around the chapel and rouse the neighbourhood.’

True enough, a small crowd of people were jostling in the narrow lanes around the small plot that contained the chapel, while Gwyn guarded the rickety gate through the wall that ringed the few square yards of rank grass and bare earth.

St Bartholomew’s was built on the edge of the poorest and least savoury part of Exeter. This quarter had long been known as ‘Bretayne’, probably because the Saxons had pushed out the original Celtic-British inhabitants into this ghetto area, when they invaded the West centuries before.

The church was surrounded by lanes of mean hovels, some wattle, others planked, and some with earthen walls plastered with a slime of horse-dung and lime. Smoke filtered from every one, leaking out from under the eaves of thatch, stone or turf. The inhabitants largely matched their homesteads, a poor ragged lot, who worked as porters, slaughterers, or labourers on the nearby quayside and in woollen mills on the river.

The hue and cry was supposed to flush perpetrators out of hiding and to pursue them until caught, like a fox hunt, but John privately thought it a futile process, unless the crime had been witnessed so that the miscreant could be chased.

‘She’s been dead a long while,’ observed Gwyn, stooping down from inside the gate to tug at one of the still legs protruding from the shrivelled leaves and twigs. The foot was stiff on the ankle and the whole body moved slightly because of the rigor in the whole leg.

‘Let’s move this stuff,’ grated John, and began to push aside the rubbish, which shed grey ashes from the twigs and dry foliage.

Gwyn and the priest’s caretaker rapidly shifted the garbage, which included kitchen waste and old floor rushes, revealing the whole length of the pathetic figure. The mantle, a cloak of good-quality brown wool, was thrown right over the body, completely wrapping the head and upper part. Below it, the legs down to the calves were clad in a kirtle of cream linen, and although soiled by the rubbish, it could be seen to be of fine workmanship, with elaborate embroidery around the hem. Woollen stockings ended in delicate shoes of soft leather.

‘This is a woman of quality, Gwyn. The noble ladies of Exeter are having a bad week, I fear.’

Gwyn pushed a few over-curious citizens back through the gate and yelled at others to move away.

The coroner stooped at the side of the corpse. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got. Unwrap the cloak from her head, but gently.’

The body was lying close against the side of the stone wall and John moved crabwise to the head end, kicking aside more refuse to clear a wider space. Gwyn knelt and carefully pulled out one end of the mantle from under the woman, then drew it right back to expose her upper half.

She lay on her left side as if asleep, the face close to the wall. The coroner gently pulled on her right shoulder and rolled the stiff cadaver on to its back.

They saw a young woman, probably in her early twenties, with a peaceful expression on the even features. The face, eyes wide open, looked up at the grey sky and a few large flakes of snow fell gently on to her brow and cheeks. The hair was dark brown, parted in the centre of the crown, a plait coiled above each ear. She wore no coif or cover-chief on her head and no gorget or wimple around her throat.

John and Gwyn contemplated her for a moment, the gaping crowd behind the wall silent for once. ‘Her face seems familiar, but I can’t put a name to it,’ observed John thoughtfully.

His officer grunted. ‘She’s out of my league, a real lady by the look of her clothing. What’s she doing, alive or dead, in a low district like Bretayne?’

John knelt on the cold ground to get a closer look. ‘No marks on her face or neck. The clothing is not disarrayed, apart from her kirtle being above her ankles.’

Gwyn pointed to its hem. The bottom few inches were bloodstained and blood was mixed with the muddy ashes on the earth below. ‘Where’s that coming from? Have we got another Christina Rifford? And, if so, why is she dead?’

John shrugged and climbed to his feet. ‘We can’t leave the poor woman here. Is there room in the church?’

Gwyn looked across at the small chapel, recently rebuilt in stone to replace an older wooden structure. ‘I doubt the priest will want a corpse in there, bleeding over his floor – especially as it’s Sunday tomorrow and he’ll want to hold Mass and other offices. What about St Nicholas Priory?’

John agreed with Gwyn’s good advice. The Benedictine monks would undoubtedly show their usual charity, and the little monastery was only a few hundred yards away, towards St Mary Arches.

The rotund local priest was only too glad to get the corpse off his property and snapped orders at his caretaker and three other men who were idling among the gawping onlookers. They went into the church to fetch the bier, which was hanging by ropes in its customary place from the rafters. The four jogged out with the wooden frame and set it on its legs alongside the body. With Gwyn supervising, they lifted the rigid corpse on to it and John threw the cloak over the woman for decency’s sake.

Then he stood with Gwyn to look at the ground where the body had lain. A pool of blood, with a thin shiny skin of clot the size of a hand, lay on the hard earth. ‘Nothing else – no knife, no weapon, no footprint!’ John commented. ‘Yet she was concealed right enough. No highborn lady comes to creep under a midden to die.’ He turned to the four men standing expectantly alongside the bier. ‘Follow me to St Nicholas’s. I’ll go ahead and pray that the prior will accommodate us.’ He stalked away, leaving Gwyn to potter about the scene and to question the onlookers, before he tried to disperse them – this was an unexpected novelty to lighten their drab existence.

John threaded his way through the stinking alleys between the poverty-stricken dwellings, filled with ragged children, mangy dogs, scuttering rats and trickling sewage. He dodged handcarts filled with firewood, wandering goats and porters bent double under heavy loads. He was greeted respectfully every few yards by old men tugging their forelocks and housewives and crones bobbing their heads in salute: Sir John de Wolfe had been known to most of the town’s population even before he became coroner.

Within a couple of minutes, he reached the priory of Saint Nicholas, a small stone-built range of buildings half-way between the north wall and Fore Street. A tonsured monk in a black habit girded up to his thighs, was scratching with a hoe in a tiny vegetable plot and directed John to the prior’s cell. He was a spare, ascetic man with a miserable face, but readily agreed to house the unknown corpse in a store room next to their tiny infirmary.

By then, the bier-carriers had arrived and the frame was set down in the small chamber, which was half-full of bags of grain, old clothes and bedding. Gwyn came in soon afterwards, clutching something in his large hand. ‘We have to put a name to this lady as a matter of urgency,’ snapped the coroner. ‘Surely someone must be missing from home by now?’

His bodyguard nodded, but first thrust his fist under the coroner’s nose. His fingers opened and John saw two small, pale, soggy cylinders lying in his palm. They were each about an inch long and as thick as a little finger. Streaked with blood, they looked rather like broken pieces of candle. ‘What are they? And where did you find them?’

Gwyn humped his shoulders. ‘I don’t know what they are, but they were lying in that patch of blood under the corpse.’

The objects meant nothing to John and he turned back to his main problem, that of identity.

‘Who might know this lady?’ he asked the four carriers, the prior and the other monk with the hoe. None of them seemed to have any inspiration, until the Cornishman suggested Nesta, landlady of the Bush.

The coroner considered this for a moment. It was certainly true that his red-headed mistress was a mine of information on all manner of local gossip – and her common sense and discretion were beyond question. ‘Get down to the tavern and ask her to come up,’ he said to Gwyn. ‘I had better stay here in case our friend the sheriff gets wind of something affecting an aristocratic lady. That would even prise him away from his planning for the Chief Justiciar’s visit.’

With a final grunt, Gwyn vanished into the town.

The morning was a relatively slack time at the Bush for the Welsh innkeeper and within twenty minutes, she was at St Nicholas’s, a green cloak thrown hastily over her aproned figure.

‘Great God, Sir Crowner, is there a campaign against the young women of Exeter?’ she asked, as soon as she arrived at the store room door. Nesta spoke in Welsh, which both John and Gwyn could readily understand: his mother Enyd had used it with him as a child, and Gwyn’s native Cornish was virtually the same language.

‘She is no town drab, this one,’ John told her, as they entered the temporary mortuary. ‘Her clothing is fine and she has the whole aspect of a Norman lady. There is blood upon her, but no obvious wound – and I hesitate to look further at her body at this stage.’

Nesta had seen many a tavern fight and was no stranger to blood and even corpses, but she entered the mortuary with some trepidation. A narrow window-slit threw a dim light from the overcast sky and the monks had lit a few candle-ends to add to the illumination.

John, with Gwyn at his back, walked to the bier, gently steering Nesta by the elbow.

‘These are really superb garments,’ she explained, a slight quiver in her voice as she approached the still, covered form on the trestle. ‘The shoes alone would cost me a week’s takings – and that fine wool cloak is more than I am ever likely to have.’

John slowly lifted the mantle and draped it to one side, letting it hang to the floor. Nesta stood breathlessly still, as rigid as the dead woman on the bier. Then she slowly exhaled. ‘I know her, John!’ Turning to him, she said, ‘Surely you must too?’

‘The face seems familiar, but I can recall no name.’

The innkeeper looked up at him, her big eyes round in her pleasant features. ‘It’s Adele, daughter of Reginald de Courcy, of the manor of Shillingford.’

John’s bushy eyebrows rose an inch up his forehead. ‘Of course! I know Reginald, so I must have seen his daughter with him at some function.’

Nesta looked pityingly at the dead young woman lying still and stiff on her wooden bed. ‘Poor woman – she was only twenty years old. And soon to be married, too!’

The coroner’s eyebrows could go no higher. ‘Good God! Another young woman betrothed, like Christina.’

Nesta knew all the society gossip from overhearing endless conversations at the Bush. ‘The wedding was to be at Easter in the cathedral, a grand affair.’

‘To whom, for God’s sake?’

‘Hugh Ferrars, son of Lord Guy Ferrars.’

John whistled. The de Courcys were an affluent family, with several manors in south Devon, but Lord Ferrars was a major landowner in the West Country.

‘There’ll be the devil to pay over this,’ he muttered. Though he was an independent spirit, who offered little deference to anyone but Richard Coeur de Lion, the significance of a sudden and probably criminal death interrupting the union of a de Courcy and a Ferrars struck him forcefully. ‘Now we know who she is, we need to know urgently how she came to her death. And who hid her in a rubbish tip.’

Nesta’s eyes travelled down the still figure until they reached the skirt of the kirtle. Now that the body was lying on its back, an ominous bloodstain was visible on the fabric between the thighs, as well as at the hem.

‘There are no injuries on the head, neck or chest,’ offered Gwyn, watching her gaze move over the body.

Nesta turned back to John. ‘This seems women’s business once again, John. I doubt that even the King’s coroner will want to probe the nether parts of a de Courcy lady, especially one who is the fiancée of a Ferrars!’

John agreed fervently with her. Only in extreme circumstances would a man, other than perhaps a leech, investigate what was patently a lethal condition relating to a woman’s anatomy. He looked at Nesta and she returned his gaze. Then, almost as if a spark jumped between them, they both said, ‘Dame Madge!’ The gaunt nun from Polsloe priory had been such a strength and support over Christina Rifford that she was the obvious person to help them now.

‘Do you think this lady may also have been ravished?’ asked Gwyn.

Nesta turned up her hands helplessly. ‘How can I tell? It’s possible, but even if I dare examine her private parts, I am no expert. I’m a tavern-keeper, not a midwife.’

The way ahead seemed inevitable and, within a few minutes, John had dispatched Gwyn to ride the mile to Polsloe to fetch the formidable nun.

Now Nesta decided to make herself scarce. Though she had a thick skin and knew that most of the town were well aware of her relationship with Sir John, she wanted to avoid appearing blatantly with him in public so often that people would think she was trying to displace his wife.

As she prepared to leave, John said that he would have to carry the news to Richard de Revelle. ‘This is one case that I don’t wish to handle alone – not with de Courcys and Ferrars involved!’ he said, with feeling.

They went their various ways, leaving the prior of St Nicholas to lay a flower on the still body of Adele, before kneeling in prayer at the foot of her bier.