The Poisoned Chalice

Chapter Nine In which Crowner John meets an old crone

That Saturday afternoon saw frantic activity among the various participants in this latest tragedy. Reginald de Courcy’s seneschal rode off at a gallop to Shillingford to take the sad news to Adele’s mother and sisters. He was to bring them back to the house in Exeter, where Adele’s body would be taken for the night.

When the Ferrars and de Courcys arrived with the sheriff, John de Wolfe was waiting for them in the small courtyard. With his typical directness, the coroner told them that Adele had died of a miscarriage criminally induced by some unknown person. If a thunderbolt carrying twenty angels had descended just then their shock and incredulity could not have been greater. As John later told Nesta, if the poor girl had been hacked into a hundred pieces or flayed alive, he felt that they would have accepted it with far less dismay than hearing that she had had an abortion.

‘She was with child?’ bellowed her father. ‘My dear Adele?’

‘The girl was pregnant?’ roared Guy Ferrars.

They both turned to Hugh, whose father gave him a swinging open-handed blow on the side of his head that almost threw him to the ground. As he staggered upright, Reginald de Courcy punched him straight in the face, so that blood spurted from his nose and he reeled backwards again. Both older men seemed more concerned that the young woman had been pregnant than that she was dead.

‘You dirty bastard!’ raved de Courcy, waving his fists in the air.

Hugh’s father was purple with anger. ‘You are a Norman, boy! With Norman standards of chivalry. How could you do this to me?’

Before the lad could wipe enough blood from his face to answer, de Courcy rounded ferociously on Guy Ferrars. ‘Why could you not control this rutting son of yours, damn you? Could he not wait until Easter to bed the poor girl? Are there not enough whores in the town to satisfy him?’

Lord Ferrars, in an equally towering rage, thrust his face against that of de Courcy and his right hand came up to give him a shove in the shoulder that pushed him against the wall. ‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that, God blast you!’

There was an ominous rattling of swords in scabbards and both the coroner and the sheriff stepped forward hastily to grab the combatants by the shoulders and pull them apart.

‘Now, remember where you are, sirs,’ shouted Richard, waving his arm at the priory walls.

‘This is not seemly, with the lady lying dead inside,’ snapped John harshly, giving Ferrars another pull.

The two men subsided, but stood glaring ferociously at each other, turning only when Hugh spat out enough blood to begin protesting his innocence. ‘It was not me, I swear it.’ He gagged. ‘I never laid a finger on her.’

His father grabbed him by the ear. ‘A likely story!’

Hugh desperately rubbed blood off his face with the back of his hand. ‘It’s not me, Father, I tell you! I swear it was not me!’

Once again his father grabbed him, by the neck of his tunic this time, and thrust his face close to Hugh’s. ‘You swear that?’

‘Of course. I hardly so much as kissed her these last six months. To tell truth, I don’t think she cared much for that sort of thing.’

‘Are you sure, my son? You swear this on your sword?’

For answer, Hugh immediately drew out three feet of steel from its sheath and holding it aloft like a processional Cross, swore solemnly on his knight’s honour that it was not he who had caused Adele to conceive. In the martial ethics that were the religion of the Ferrars, this was more than enough to satisfy his father, who would have slain his son with his own hands if he discovered that he lied in making this solemn oath on his sword.

Guy turned triumphantly to de Courcy. ‘Eat your words, sir! You have defamed my family, yet now it seems it was your own daughter that was the wayward one. If it was not my son, then she must have lain with some other man!’

De Courcy, another Norman with the same reverence for such a solemn oath, was deflated. John somehow felt that the dead woman had been forgotten for the moment in this battle of family honours.

Lord Ferrars had not yet finished his tirade. Relentlessly, he went on, ‘You would have let my son wed your impure daughter, if this had not happened, sir! Affianced to my son and carrying some other lover’s child, eh? Is that the way for a Norman to behave?’

This was too much for de Courcy, who tore himself out of de Revelle’s restraining hands and lunged forward again at Ferrars, trying to drag out his sword at the same time.

‘Don’t you dare impugn my daughter’s honour, Ferrars!’ he yelled. ‘She was good enough for your son yesterday. Now she lies dead yet you slander her, she who cannot defend herself. If it indeed be true that this son of yours was not the father of this illegitimacy, then she must have been the victim of some ravishment, like that poor daughter of the burgess this week.’

‘And how is it that you had not heard of this imagined rape?’ snapped Guy, sarcastically.

‘She may have been too ashamed or timid to tell us,’ said de Courcy, now quite persuaded that his own theory must be true. Hugh Ferrars had recovered his voice, but not his temper.

‘The father is of no consequence at the moment,’ he shouted. ‘She is dead and I am not to wed her. But someone took her life, by the evil of procuring her miscarriage. He deprived me of my betrothed and my honour is at stake. I will seek him out and kill him … and then find the father and kill him too!’ He whipped out his sword and waved it crazily in the air.

By now a small crowd of bystanders from the nearby huts had lined up along the low wall of the courtyard and were gazing with bated breath at this unexpected drama that had come to enliven their afternoon.

Gwyn and Thomas watched from the other side of the courtyard, the Cornishman uncertain as to whether he should wade in and knock a few heads together. But his master gave no sign, and the rank of the people involved suggested that he had better keep his fists to himself.

The sheriff, wishing himself a thousand miles away, moved in to attempt peacemaking.

‘Sirs, the strain of the moment tells on us all, especially those so close to the dead lady. But we have work to do, if we are to seek the perpetrator of this crime. I need you to look at the corpse and confirm that it is indeed Mistress de Courcy.’ Grudgingly, he added, ‘And I suppose the crowner needs something similar for his formalities.’

In another part of the small city, Edgar was back at work in the shop of Nicholas the apothecary. He had been up to see Christina again and was mortified to find her listless, silent and apparently uninterested in his presence. In spite of Aunt Bernice’s feeble attempts to bring them together, the Portreeve’s daughter had sat pallidly in her chair by the hall fire, staring at the crackling logs, unresponsive apart from a few murmured monosyllables in answer to his attempts at sympathy.

The skinny young man sat forlornly on a stool near her side, the fringe of his hair hanging lankly down his forehead as he tried helplessly to find something to say that would arouse the smallest spark of animation in her lovely face. Edgar’s feelings were ambivalent. One minute he was melting with anguished pity for his intended wife, the next he felt as if he lived in another world from the stranger called Christina. Endlessly, he thrust down the devil’s thought that he could now never bring himself to marry her, a woman who had been known, in the Biblical sense, by another man.

After half an hour he gave up and, with a shaming feeling of relief, made some excuse about having to get back to his apprentice-master.

Edgar escaped into the high street and wandered blindly past the Carfoix crossing and into Fore Street, where Nicholas of Bristol had his establishment. As he went, the sense of shame at his own inconstancy gradually faded, to be replaced by growing anger. This always seemed to happen when he left the Rifford house and walked out among other people. His anger was diffuse, directed against the whole masculine world. For all he knew, the next elbow he knocked in the narrow street might be that of Christina’s ravisher.

He wanted to find that man and put a sword through his ribs – not only in retribution for the girl’s defilement, but in revenge for the way in which his own well-ordered life had been turned upside down. His wedding was now in jeopardy, people’s fingers would be pointed at him as the lover of a sullied woman – and his treasured training as an apothecary was disrupted by all these turbulent emotions.

As he hurried along, lurching into passers-by without taking the slightest notice of their protests, he felt for the hilt of his dagger, for he carried no sword. Muttering under his breath, he prayed to all the saints he could remember that they would put the rapist in front of him at that very moment, so that he could inflict unimaginable tortures and wounds upon him with the point of his knife.

As he reached the leech’s shop, sanity came upon him abruptly and, with a further flush of shame, he took his hand off his dagger and composed himself. He had realised how ridiculous his behaviour was. It was almost as if the proximity to the apothecary brought him back inside the aura of medical ethics. Edgar was an earnest young man and had read of the Greek Hippocrates, Father of Physicians, who had preached that, to a healer, everything was transcended by the welfare of the patient. Confused, he shook his head, as if throwing off devils, and pushed open the door of the shop.

Inside, the familiar scene and the smell of herbs and potions immediately calmed him. A woman was at the counter with a small boy, purchasing a salve that Nicholas was pressing into a small wooden pot with a bone spatula. ‘What do you think of this Master Edgar? Look at the lad’s hands.’

Nicholas was a good teacher and shared the experience of every patient with his apprentice. Edgar forgot his troubles for a moment, to immerse himself in clinical diagnosis. A quick glance at the reddened pits in the webs of skin between the child’s fingers told him it was scabies.

‘Quite right, Edgar. And what will you ask this good lady?’

The apprentice turned to the woman, an anxious-looking merchant’s wife from Mary Arches Lane. ‘Have you other children, mistress?’

‘Three more boys and a girl.’

‘Then smear the same ointment on their hands, for if they haven’t caught it yet they soon will. And keep an eye on the rest of their skin for similar itching marks, though you needn’t look above their neck, they never get afflicted in the head.’

As the woman left the shop with her greasy salve, Nicholas beamed at his apprentice’s medical acumen. The apothecary was a short man of about forty, rather pasty-faced, with a shock of curly hair, prematurely grey. He had a major affliction in that a palsy of the face had struck him five years ago, leaving him with the left corner of his mouth and left eyelid sagging, the cheek drooping like a wrinkled leather purse. His lips would not quite close and spittle tended to dribble out of the corner of his mouth, which he constantly wiped away with a piece of cloth. Nicholas enquired gravely about the situation in the Rifford family and showed considerable sympathy with Edgar’s current mortification.

The young man from Topsham was his only apprentice and Nicholas was a kind and considerate master, which Edgar repaid by being a devoted and hard-working assistant. They spoke for some time about the awful affair, little knowing of an even more awful business that was taking place only a few hundred yards away at St Nicholas’s. Edgar soon got back to work, checking bottles and jars and refilling empty ones from stock.

As he reached up to place pottery jars with Latin names on the shelves that ran all around the walls, the apothecary was chopping herbs with a large knife on a wooden board placed on the counter. They were the last of the season, to be dried for winter use. As he methodically tap-tapped across the board, he chatted to Edgar, to try to divert the younger man’s mind from his problems. They discussed the batch of fungi that Nicholas had brought in from the fields around the city that morning, those that were good to eat, that had medicinal properties and those that were poisonous.

‘Where did you learn about such things?’ asked Edgar curiously.

‘From my own master when I was an apprentice in Bristol. He used to send me out into the woods and pastures around the deep gorge above the river, to search for such moulds, and then he would test me on their names and their properties.’

‘Is that why you are called Nicholas of Bristol – because you were apprenticed there?’

The apothecary stopped chopping for a moment to reflect. ‘I was only called that after I came to Exeter six years ago. I was born in Bristol and my father was Henry Thatcher, for that was his trade. I was just plain Nicholas there, even when I had my own apothecary’s shop near the quayside.’

For a moment, his apprentice was diverted from his troubles. ‘So why did you leave Bristol, if it was your birthplace and where you had a business?’

Nicholas seemed rather evasive. ‘Trade was not too good – half my customers were sailors or whores who came to have their clap treated. I decided to start afresh somewhere else, before I got a bad reputation as being only a pox-doctor.’ He seemed reluctant to pursue his past history and changed the subject.

Their talk ranged from this week’s executions at the gallows outside the city to the price of unspun wool, which they used for dressings and padding splints. Edgar was an authority on the wool trade, through his family’s business, and explained that this year’s poor crop had pushed up the price, especially as the demand in Normandy and Brittany was now greater.

Privately, Nicholas wondered why his apprentice was so keen to pursue the vocation of apothecary, having a ready-made and lucrative trade in the family, which Joseph of Topsham was obviously keen to hand on to his son.

Then the talk was suddenly brought back by Edgar to his own problems. ‘Has there been much gossip in the town about Christina?’ he asked, rather fiercely.

Nicholas hesitated. ‘You know what people are, Edgar. They like to bandy news about, especially bad news. There have been a few customers who enquired after you, knowing that you and the lady were to be married.’

Edgar banged a pot on to a shelf with unnecessary force. ‘Were to be married! Perhaps that sums it up, for I am no longer sure that Christina is concerned about a wedding.’

‘Oh, come now, boy! It will take weeks for her mind to settle, poor girl. Give her time and I’m sure all will be well again.’

‘But I’m not sure that I want to marry her now,’ blurted out Edgar. He could talk to his master more easily than to his father about things of the heart.

Nicholas stopped his chopping and looked up at his apprentice, who was now perched on a stool to reach the upper shelves. ‘That, too, is understandable, but you must give it time, boy.’

Edgar worried away at the matter, like a dog with a bone. ‘Have the gossips suggested any likely culprits for this shameful crime?’ he asked, through gritted teeth.

Nicholas considered for a moment. ‘Nothing sensible. Only a wild rumour that Godfrey Fitzosbern might know something about it – but that’s surely because his was the last place your lady visited before the assault.’

Edgar clattered off the stool and turned, red-faced, to his master. ‘Everyone seems to have this idea. There must be fire where there is smoke.’

The apothecary tried to placate his pupil. ‘The sheriff took in Fitzosbern’s two workmen but they were released within the hour. As our sheriff usually likes to hang the nearest suspect as a matter of convenience, that must mean there is no substance to the gossip.’

‘It can also mean that the workmen are innocent and the suspicion falls all the more heavily on their master!’ cried Edgar, pacing the narrow space behind the counter. ‘All fingers seem to point at that man, especially with the reputation he has for fornication and adultery.’

Nicholas clicked his tongue in warning. ‘Be careful what you say, my boy. That man is a bad one to cross. Christ knows that I have no love for him, as he continually blocks my efforts to form a Guild of Apothecaries here in the West – but, even so, I would not dare accuse him of rape without some solid evidence.’

The apprentice seemed unconvinced and fingered his dagger hilt as he paced restlessly up and down the shop, muttering under his breath. ‘I will confront him, see if I will, Nicholas! My gut tells me he is the man. I’ll have it out with him yet!’

The herb-master sighed at the young man’s rapid changes of mood and wondered if there was some calming soporific he could slip into Edgar’s broth at the next meal.

By early afternoon, there was a temporary lull in the panics of the day and John took the opportunity to visit the Bush. He had been home briefly at midday and eaten a quick meal with Matilda, as part of his campaign for domestic peace. This time Mary had provided pork knuckles with boiled cabbage and carrots, which suited John well, especially as the meat was still freshly killed and not salted as it would be later in the winter. He liked plain food, though Matilda claimed to disdain such ‘serf fodder’ as she called it, professing to favour fancy cooking, especially from French kitchens. Though born and brought up in Devon, she constantly claimed to pine for her Normandy origins, conveniently ignoring that it was three generations since her forebears had crossed the Channel. The only contact she had ever had with Normandy had been a two-month visit to distant relatives, made some years before.

During the meal, John gave her sparse titbits of information about Adele’s death, to keep her mind off her recent feud with him. Matilda relished the scandal concerning the pregnancy and the denials of Hugh that he was the father and avidly anticipated the gossip that would be bandied about among the wives of Exeter.

‘Have you any thoughts on who might be the procurer of the miscarriage?’ he asked, hoping to get some practical help from among her prurient chatter. ‘Does the gossip among the ladies of the city ever suggest a name for such a person?’

His wife bridled at this. ‘That’s something that I would never lower myself to discuss,’ she snapped huffily. ‘No doubt there are drabs and old wives, especially down in the slums of Bretayne, who might perform such crimes, but I assure you no lady of quality would know of such things.’

John felt warned off the subject and, fearing that he might set her off on one of her moods, he dropped it. As soon as he could, he left the house, saying that he had to get back to Rougemont to dictate to Thomas de Peyne, but as soon as he reached the high street, he turned left and hurried down to Idle Lane.

Gwyn was in the tavern, filling his capacious stomach with a halfpenny meal and ale. As soon as she could leave her tasks with her cook in the back yard and the girl who put out the pallets and blankets in the dormitory upstairs, Nesta came across and plumped herself down next to them on a bench, to talk to them in Welsh.

‘A good thing for trade, this visit of the Justiciar,’ she exclaimed, pushing a wisp of auburn hair back under her coif. ‘Every penny palliasse and pile of straw upstairs is booked for the next four nights, with people coming to see the great Archbishop!’

‘Coming to petition him and beg some favour, more likely,’ growled the ever-cynical Gwyn.

The comely innkeeper was anxious to be brought up to date on the day’s tragedy, especially as she had played a major role in identifying the victim. John told her the story as far as it was known, and repeated the question he had asked his wife about possible abortionists in the city.

Nesta’s pretty face frowned slightly as she concentrated her thoughts. ‘I can’t say I know of anyone who attacks the womb, so to speak.’ She grinned impishly at the coroner. ‘I’ve not yet needed such services, in spite of your endless efforts to get me with child!’

John nipped her thigh with his fingers in retribution. ‘Enough of that loose talk, madam. But is there no one who tries to help women who are with child? God knows, there are many poor families with too many little mouths to feed.’

Nesta nodded readily enough. ‘Oh, where it comes to old wives’ remedies, there are plenty who peddle herbs and magic potions to restore the monthly flow. Useless, most of them, but a few hags have a reputation for success.’

‘Such as whom?’

The Welsh woman considered for a moment. ‘I should seek out old Bearded Lucy. She is well known for her pills and remedies – the poor come to her when they can’t afford a leech.’

‘Where can we find her?’

‘She lives in a hovel in Frog Lane, on Exe Island. You can’t miss her – she has almost as much hair on her face as this great lump of a Cornishman here.’

Gwyn grinned happily, he was almost as fond of Nesta as his master was, and greatly enjoyed her poking fun at him.

John rubbed his dark jowls reflectively. ‘Bearded Lucy? Wasn’t she in danger of being drowned as a witch some years ago?’

Nesta looked blank – it had been before her time in Exeter – but his officer nodded. ‘I remember that. It was soon after we came back from the Irish campaign of ’eighty-five. Some man in the market dropped dead and she brought him back to life some minutes later by beating on his chest and yelling magical spells.’

The coroner gave one of his rare laughs. ‘Yes, I recall it now. The man was a member of one of the guilds and he raised a petition among them to have her pardoned, after the Bishop’s court convicted her of being in league with the devil.’

John’s mistress was not surprised. ‘When you see her you might well believe that – and that she might ride the night sky on a broomstick. She is such a hag that the mothers on Exe Island use her to frighten their children when they misbehave.’

De Wolfe stretched out his arms and yawned. ‘We shall see for ourselves before long. Gwyn, hurry and shovel to rest of that mutton into your gut. We need a walk down to the river.’

Exe Island was formed from the marsh that lay around the western end of the city wall. Exeter came downhill to its river there, but the Exe was no tidy stream running between banks: it was a shifting meander of swamp and mud shoals. The city was at the upper limit of the high tides and this, together with the greatly variable flood that ran down from distant Exmoor, caused the land outside the West Gate to change constantly. For years, efforts had been made to stabilise the area by cutting leats through the marsh to drain it and to persuade the main channel of the river to keep to its bed. An island had been laboriously formed, and a settlement, with fulling mills for the wool trade, had been set up on the extra land.

A precarious footbridge crossed the river to join the road to the west, but only people on foot could use it, all cattle, horses and wagons having to splash across the ford. During the past four years efforts had been made to build a substantial stone bridge. However, the builder Walter Gervase, had run out of money, as the length of the bridge needed proved so expensive. It was against the deserted stonework of this bridge that the coroner and his officer found Frog Lane, the name quite appropriate in this marshy bog. They came out of the West Gate and trudged along a track, still whitened by the light snowfall, until they squelched down a muddy bank to the entrance of an ill-defined lane. This was lined by mean shacks, even worse than those in Bretayne. Wood smoke poured up into the leaden sky from a fire in each hovel. Several dwellings were burned-out shells, testifying to the dangers of open fires in huts built largely of hazel withies woven together and plastered with mud on the outside.

The usual collection of barefoot urchins followed their progress, apparently oblivious to the December cold. Women wrapped in ragged shawls ambled between huts, and men with oat-sacks over their shoulders as makeshift cloaks carried huge bundles of raw wool from the quayside, which lay further down-river, to the fulling mill at the end of the lane.

‘Where does Bearded Lucy dwell?’ demanded John of the nearest and dirtiest urchin dancing about him.

The boy made a leering grimace and he and his companions all started jigging about with their fingers spread at their foreheads in imitation of hobgoblins. ‘Bearded Lucy, Bearded Lucy is a witch!’ they all chanted in unison.

Gwyn took a swipe at the leader, but he hopped nimbly out of the way. ‘Where is she, boy?’ he roared.

One of the lads, less antisocial than the rest, pointed between the two nearest hovels to a hut set back from the lane, sitting alone on a wide expanse of reeds.

The two law officers set off along the side of a stagnant leat that led to it and were soon in wet mud, their feet lifting at every step with a sucking noise.

‘By St Peter and St Paul, this must be the worst bloody place for miles around,’ muttered de Wolfe, as he felt the water seeping through the seams of his leather shoes.

‘Surely a fancy lady like Adele de Courcy would never come down here,’ objected Gwyn.

John shrugged. ‘Women in dire trouble, like having a full womb and an imminent marriage to someone else, would dare a lot, Gwyn.’

They reached the hut, which was even more dilapidated than the others. It leaned over precariously to one side so that it seemed about to fall into the leat, probably because the marsh had sunk under its flimsy foundations. Smoke filtered out from under the tattered reed thatch, which was patched with clods of turf. There was no door, but a fence hurdle was propped on end to block the entrance. Gwyn heaved it aside and yelled into the smoky interior, ‘Anyone there?’

Feet shuffled through the dirty straw on the earth floor and a bowed figure came to the entrance. Though John had seen many strange and misshapen people in his time, this one was unique. Grotesquely ugly to begin with, the hag’s face was almost covered with wispy grey hair; only the upper cheeks, nose and forehead were bald. One eye had a red, inflamed lid that pouted outwards, and a slack mouth revealed toothless pink gums. That the person was female was hinted at by the nature of the rags she wore and the dirty close-fitting bonnet tied under her chin.

‘Who is it? Why do men come to my dwelling?’ she demanded, in a rasping, querulous voice, ending in a fit of coughing, which brought up a bloodstained gobbet that she spat on to the floor.

‘I am the King’s coroner and this is my officer. You are the woman they call Bearded Lucy.’

It was a statement, rather than a question, but the old crone nodded. She was bent far worse than Thomas, but probably from the same phthisis of the spine, thought John.

‘I need to ask you some questions, woman.’

Lucy cackled. ‘Am I accused again of being a witch, sir? I care not. It would be a mercy to be hanged or drowned, anything rather than live like this.’

‘I am told that you have been know to help women who are with child and wish to lose their burden?’

She sighed. ‘Do you want to come in, sirs? Or will you arrest me out here?’

They declined to go into the hut, having a fair idea of the state of the inside and its various infestations.

John, used to human suffering and despair, yet felt stirrings of sympathy for the old woman, whose mind seemed clear though her body was a wreck. ‘We are not here to arrest you, old woman, but I need information about a woman who lies dead in the city.’

He explained about Adele de Courcy and the nun’s diagnosis of a bleeding miscarriage. ‘Did such a lady ever seek your help?’

Bearded Lucy’s dulled eyes rose to meet his and, hardened as he was, he flinched a little and remembered all the tales of witches that his mother had told him as a child. ‘Describe her to me,’ she demanded.

The coroner did his best and the crone began to nod. ‘It must be the same one. Very rarely does any lady of quality come to me. I deal mostly with my neighbours and those from the lower town and the villages nearby. But such a woman visited me a month or two ago.’ Another spasm of coughing racked her. Then she said, ‘My conscience is clear for I could do nothing for her. She had missed two of her monthly issues and was getting desperate. I did not ask why, though she wore no wedding ring.’

‘Did you do any damage to her, old wife?’ John demanded.

‘No, those days are over for me. But I gave her some herbs, aloes and parsley, and some pessaries of pennyroyal. She gave me sixpence, bless her, then went away.’

Gwyn broke into the inquisition. ‘How do you know they did her no harm, then?’

The hag swivelled her bent head and looked up at him obligingly. ‘Because she came back. Two weeks ago she returned and said that she was still with child, as my previous potions had not had any effect. They rarely do, for when women miscarry in the early months it is because they would have done so anyway. But sometimes I get the credit for what God performs.’

‘She wanted something stronger?’

‘She wanted me to interfere with her – the lady knew, as I did, that she had gone too far for any of my witchcraft to have the slightest effect.’

John glared at the old woman. His previous pity had evaporated. ‘So what did you do to her?’

‘Nothing, sir. Look at this.’ She raised her arms and held her hands in front of her. They shook like leaves in the wind. ‘And my eyesight is almost gone, I have cataracts in both. What chance is there for me to do anything? I can just manage to find my mouth on the times when I have some food.’

Gwyn murmured to the coroner, ‘If it was two weeks ago, it can hardly have been here, if the lady bled yesterday.’

John nodded and turned back to the hag. ‘You swear you did nothing?’

‘I told her there was nothing I could do and she went away, poor girl.’

John tackled her for a few more minutes, but there seemed nothing more she could or would tell him. He had the tickle of intuition that there was something else she might have said, but all his prising failed to bring it out.

When the bearded woman began a prolonged fit of coughing that ended in a trickle of blood at the corner of her loose-lipped mouth, he decided that enough was enough, and they squelched their way back to the relative civilisation within the city wall.