The Sanctuary Seeker

Chapter Thirteen In which Crowner John attends an ordeal

Much against John’s will, the Ordeal went ahead and, whether he liked it or not, he had to attend. His antagonism to the procedure was not due to humanitarian distaste – or even his healthy scepticism about its usefulness – but because it rankled with him that his brother-in-law could so easily interfere with the coroner’s work. Unfortunately, as he had complained to Gwyn during their ride back from Dartmoor, there had been as yet no firm ruling from the royal justices as to how the jurisdiction of coroner and sheriff interlocked.

Reluctantly, John had to admit that the sheriff’s task was to arrest suspects, investigate their crimes and either try them at the county court, or keep them in custody for the royal judges. It was clear enough that for theft, assault, treason and the like the sheriff had sole responsibility – but where there was a body, the coroner was obliged to record all the facts for the Justices in Eyre, even though he could not try the cases. He also had to examine rapes and serious assaults and record the facts – but it was not clear whether this should prevent the sheriff from trying these cases, as he had been doing for centuries, at least since the time of the Saxon king Aethelstan.

Whatever the rights and wrongs, de Revelle was intent on putting Alan Fitzhai to the Ordeal, and tomorrow morning was the soonest it could be staged.

After he had walked the short distance from the cloisters to his house, the coroner learned from Mary that his wife was still locked in her solar so, not in the mood for another confrontation, John took himself to the Bush, seeking beer and sympathy. Rather to his surprise, he found Gwyn sitting at one of the benches, tucking into a mutton knuckle and onions soaking into a slab-like trencher of bread.

‘Has your wife thrown you out as well?’ he asked, sitting on a stool opposite.

Gwyn stopped chewing on the bone to shake his head. ‘Her brother, the one that’s a carter, came through from Taunton on his way back to Polruan so she and the children have taken a ride on his wagon to see her mother. Won’t be back for two weeks or more, when he makes the next trip.’

Nesta bustled up to give the new arrival a quart jar of ale and a quick squeeze on the shoulder. ‘You’ve come at a busy time, John. I’ll be with you when I’ve settled these folk in their penny beds.’

Half a dozen pilgrims, with wide-brimmed hats and tall staves, had just arrived on their way from Truro to Canterbury, and the businesslike innkeeper was hurrying about, shouting at her chambermaid to bring extra pallets for the upstairs dormitory and yelling at the cook to throw more meat into the pot.

John threw his black cloak on to a bench and took a deep swallow of his beer. ‘So we’re both temporary widowers, Gwyn. Thank God for taverns or we’d both starve and go mad with boredom. What that poxy clerk of ours does with his time I can’t imagine. He never goes into an inn unless we’re travelling.’

Gwyn gave one of his grunts and returned to tearing meat from his knuckle. When this was done, he wiped the fat from his moustache with the back of his hand.

‘I heard about Alan Fitzhai,’ he said. The fraternity of sergeants and men-at-arms in Rougemont seemed to have an almost instantaneous method of communicating gossip.

‘That he’s in the gaol or having to undergo the Ordeal?’ asked John.

‘Both. But I don’t know if it’s supposed to make him open his mouth wider – if he has anything to tell – or to prove his guilt or innocence.’

The coroner sank a good half-pint of ale in one swallow. ‘It’s supposed to determine guilt. These things were dreamed up by priests long ago, so they say, but I can’t see the sense of it myself.’

Gwyn began to tear the gravy-soaked bread into lumps, which he stuffed into his mouth before answering. ‘It’s like this business of murder suspects touching the bier of a dead man, I reckon.’

John frowned, his craggy face furrowing. ‘But that happened to our King when old Henry died at Chinon in ’eighty-nine.’ The story went that when Richard the Lionheart had approached the body of his recently dead father in the abbey of Fontrevault, the corpse began to bleed from the nose and mouth. Richard had fallen to his knees and wept tears of guilt for having contributed to his father’s death.

John wasn’t ready to dismiss all such beliefs, even when they were to the discredit of his hero, Richard Coeur de Lion.

‘But Richard didn’t kill him, did he?’ persisted Gwyn.

‘Helped break the old man’s heart when all his sons turned against him. I’d have expected it of that bastard John, but not my lord Richard.’

They were silent as they both played over old battles in their minds. Then John returned to practicalities. ‘If the sheriff forces Fitzhai to prance across nine red-hot ploughshares or whatever he plans for the Ordeal, then we must try to get as much information out of him as possible beforehand about Hubert de Bonneville.’

Gwyn vigorously wiped the last of the onion gravy from the scrubbed table with the final crust and thrust it between his lips. ‘And as quickly as possible, too,’ he said, through a mouthful. ‘Half the people I’ve seen go through the Ordeal die of shock or burns the same day.’

Nesta, her duties finished, bustled across and tried to push Gwyn from his stool. ‘Go on, you’ve been fed well enough now. Go and sit by the fire with your pot and let me talk to John.’

Gwyn ambled away amiably to talk to a group clustered near the roaring logs, leaving Nesta alone with the coroner.

‘Can you stay tonight?’ she asked, directly.

He looked into her attractive, open face and wished that he could. ‘It isn’t politic, according to my maid,’ he said, with a lopsided grin.

‘The hell with her!’ exploded the red-head, who had a temper to match her colouring. ‘Since when has she decided who you sleep with?’

Patiently, John explained his domestic crisis, and his mistress’s wrath subsided as quickly as it had arisen. She even laughed at the thought of him sleeping in his cloak on his own floor and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek.

‘Well, unless you’re thinking of leaving home for good and moving in here as a crowner-cum-innkeeper, you’d better toe the line, my lad.’ Her advice was virtually identical to Mary’s. Edwin, the one-eyed potman, limped over with a fresh jug of ale from a new barrel and leered at the pair.

‘Good to see you back, Captain,’ he croaked, with a wink at Nesta.

She kicked his lame leg hard and told him sharply to get about his business. ‘What’s the latest on this dead crusader, John?’ she asked. ‘Like your dear wife, I’ve not seen you these past few days.’ Nesta was anxious to keep abreast of all the county gossip. Usually she was a one-woman intelligence service, thanks to all the comings and goings at the tavern, but she was not up to date on this case.

John told her of all that had transpired and of the torment that Alan Fitzhai would suffer next morning.

‘Do you think he did it?’ she demanded, taking a mouthful of his drink.

‘How can I tell? He’s hiding something, that’s for sure. Something was between Fitzhai and the dead man, but that falls far short of suspecting him of murder.’

Nesta nodded sagely. ‘You need a motive, that’s what you need,’ she said, profoundly. ‘And what about this other corpse up on high Dartmoor? D’you think there’s any connection?’

‘They’ve both been in Palestine, obviously, and though he was corrupt, this last corpse had healed sword wounds not a year old. But that’s not to say he was anything to do with de Bonneville, though he did have a similar stab wound in the back,’ he added, thoughtfully.

John could almost hear Nesta’s astute brain ticking away.

‘Why not enquire in Southampton?’ she said. ‘Maybe to see if any one was with the Widecombe man when they arrived from France. This Fitzhai knew him, so maybe someone else saw something. Did he say he was alone in Honiton?’

John agreed to send Gwyn next day to see what could be discovered at the various ports along the Dorset coast and on to Southampton, the main entry-point from Normandy.

‘There! You need a woman’s touch in this,’ teased Nesta. ‘You men don’t have enough imagination.’

John slipped a hand under the table and squeezed her thigh. He was suddenly beginning to feel that there was more to life than discussing violent crime.

‘Let’s go up the ladder and discuss it in private, my girl,’ he said quietly. ‘I can’t stay all night, but I won’t be missed at home for a few hours.’

Next morning, an hour after dawn, they assembled in the sinister chamber below the keep of Rougemont Castle. It was half-subterranean, reached by a flight of steps leading down from the muddy bailey – a gloomy place, made ruddy by a few flaming torches stuck into iron rings set in the walls. Beyond it, on the same level, was the gaol. A passage left the main chamber, with a series of heavy doors leading off each side into cells furnished only with chains and dirty straw. John de Wolfe came down the steps with Thomas behind him. Gwyn had already set off eastwards to tour the ports.

In the dank, shadowy chamber, the sheriff, his bailiff and the constable Ralph Morin were gathered together with Thomas de Boterellis, the cathedral Precentor, sent by his bishop to represent the Church. The guard sergeant and several men-at-arms stood watchfully around the walls.

As John walked in, he saw that they were grouped around a large iron bucket about three feet high, set on four big stones on the earthen floor. A fire of logs and charcoal burned in a clay-pit underneath, tended by Stigand the gaoler, a dirty, grossly obese man, who crouched on the floor feeding firewood under the bucket to keep the water boiling.

Richard de Revelle greeted his brother-in-law with false joviality, as if they were meeting for a pleasant breakfast rather than preparing to inflict a maiming torture on a healthy man. If the sheriff had heard of the quarrel between John and his sister, he avoided any mention of it and went straight to the business of the morning.

‘You’ll agree that this Fitzhai, though he be Norman of sorts, is a damned liar?’ he said.

John agreed unwillingly that the fellow was almost certainly holding something back. ‘But that doesn’t make him a killer. Why should it?’

Richard, elegant as ever in a bright blue tunic, gestured his indifference. ‘Let’s see what he has to tell us when his mind is concentrated by our little ceremony, eh?’

The coroner scowled. ‘Then give him a chance to divulge it all first. He may tell us all that is necessary without maiming the fellow?’

The sheriff tapped his nose, which he did almost as often as Thomas de Peyne crossed himself. ‘We may get a confession as well. Kill two birds with one stone – a very hot stone!’ He laughed at his own joke and the Precentor, an overfed priest with a round, waxy-white face, joined in his amusement.

‘It will fix his guilt or innocence as well, so that’s three birds for us.’ He sniggered.

John was not amused, but any more badinage was ended by the squeal of the gaol’s barred iron gate.

Two soldiers pushed a bedraggled Alan Fitzhai into the big room. His hands were free but his ankles were shackled with rusted metal bands so that he could only shuffle and stumble as he was prodded by the guards. He was in a poor state, compared to the last time John had seen him. His clothes were the same, but they were crumpled and filthy, his hair and beard were tangled, his cheeks were hollow, and he blinked in even that poor light, which was bright compared to the Stygian gloom of the cells. As soon as he saw the sheriff, coroner and constable, Fitzhai began to shout his indignation and innocence, until one of the guards gave him a shove that sent him staggering over his manacled ankles.

De Revelle stepped forward to stand in front of the prisoner. ‘Everything points to you as the man who did this foul killing,’ he lied, ‘but now you have a chance to prove your innocence, before the Church and officers of the King.’

Alan stared at him in amazement. ‘King Richard! If he knew of my condition now, he would vouch for me to the hilt. I fought for him at Acre and Arsuf and Jaffa … and this is the reward I get!’

The sheriff, who had been no nearer to the Holy Land than Aquitaine, dismissed this. ‘That’s not the issue, Fitzhai. A fellow Crusader lies dead, as well as another man back from the Holy Land – and you are the best candidate for the crime.’

Fitzhai was frightened, but still pugnacious. ‘Another Crusader dead? Who is he? I know nothing of this.’

John moved to face the prospective victim. ‘It’s plain there are things you did not tell us the other day when you were brought from Honiton. If you give us all the help you can, it may go better for you.’

The mercenary soldier looked from the coroner to de Revelle and back again. ‘About Hubert de Bonneville?’

John nodded. ‘Everything you know … now!’

Fitzhai hesitated, then looked at the gaoler stoking the fire under the boiler and decided to speak. ‘If I had told you a few days ago, you’d have taken it as extra proof that there was more bad blood between de Bonneville and me.’

John thought that telling it now was hardly going to improve matters, but held his tongue and let Fitzhai continue.

‘When we landed in Marseille, I said that a group of English and Welsh Crusaders decided to band together and we made our way up through France to take ship to Southampton.’ He looked down at his feet and shuffled them, making the fetters jangle. ‘Well, like all soldiers, we did plenty of drinking and carousing … and there were girls, of course. We hadn’t seen women for months – even years. Spirits and passions ran high some nights.’

De Revelle became impatient. ‘Come on, man, what are you trying to say?’

‘All of us had a girl or two on the journey, a tumble in a tavern or a hay-barn. All except that prig Hubert, of course. He should have been a priest.’ He looked sourly at the Precentor.

‘How did this get you at odds with him?’ rapped the sheriff.

‘Somewhere in Touraine I got drunk and took a girl in an inn. We were all the worse for drink, including the women. Afterwards the girl came to me with her father and accused me of raping her.’ He raised his voice almost shrilly. ‘It was no such thing! She was eager for it, then got scared of being with child and lied to her family.’

John had heard similar stories many times – sometimes they were true, sometimes not.

‘Hubert de Bonneville became sanctimonious and sided with the father, demanding that I admit my guilt and pay off the girl and her father with gold. I told him to mind his own damn business and a fight started.’ He stared truculently at the two law officers. ‘Naturally, I won. I hammered the fool into a pulp. It started a wholesale mêlée in the tavern, between his friends and mine. Next day he went, cursing me and swearing that he’d get even one day. I never saw him again until Honiton. It was just a common fight, I forgot all about him afterwards.’

There was a silence, broken only by the crackle of the burning firewood.

‘A likely story!’ sneered the sheriff. ‘He probably hammered you and it’s you who waited for your revenge.’

‘Who is there to support this tale?’ asked the coroner.

Fitzhai shook his head. ‘All concerned are long melted to the four corners of the kingdom. But it’s true, I tell you … and I wish by the Virgin Mary that I’d never clapped eyes on the man in Honiton, even at a distance.’

John was somewhat inclined to believe him: the story rang true, of a typical squabble among travelling soldiery. But there was no proof either way and he saw no logical way of finding it. He turned to the sheriff. ‘There’s nothing more he can tell us. What point is there in doing more – or even holding him in custody?’

De Revelle stuck a thumb in his ornate belt. ‘I think he’s lying. But what does it matter? We have the means to determine the truth.’ He pointed his other thumb at the boiling water.

Fitzhai roared and tried to shuffle backwards, but another a blow from one of the guards caused him to trip and fall full length on the beaten-earth floor.

The Precentor, who wore his white surplice under a long black cloak, placed an embroidered stole around his neck, produced a prayer book and began to intone an endless dirge in Latin, incomprehensible to all but Thomas de Peyne, who began to cross himself furiously.

John lost patience with them all. ‘This is a pointless ritual, which serves no purpose but to show the Bishop that something is being done to satisfy the de Bonneville family.’

Abruptly de Boterellis stopped his Latin monologue and glowered at the coroner. ‘Have care, de Wolfe. What you are saying is perilously near sacrilege. The ceremony of the Ordeal is hallowed by Christian usage and sanctioned by the Holy Father in Rome, as well as all our bishops. To call it a pointless ritual could be construed as blasphemy.’ He resumed his reading and the sheriff stalked to the tall bucket over the fire.

‘Is the stone already at the bottom?’ he demanded of Stigand.

‘It is, sir, a full two-pound weight, a pebble from the river bed. The one we always use for the test.’

Ralph de Morin, as constable of the castle, was the commander of the guard and now signalled to the men-at-arms to start the proceedings.

Alan Fitzhai struggled violently against the grasp of his two guards, but they dragged him towards the vat of boiling water. As the steam billowed about his head, he screamed, ‘Why are you doing this to me? I’ve told you what you wanted to know.’

Richard de Revelle and the Precentor looked on impassively, but the coroner was more than uneasy. ‘The man has nothing more to tell us!’

The sheriff rounded on his brother-in-law. ‘Whatever you claim your duties to be, your business here is as a witness only, so hold your tongue.’

John could not dispute this, so he watched reluctantly as Fitzhai was manhandled to the tall bucket.

The Precentor mumbled another Latin passage from his book, then closed it and held up his right hand, two fingers together pointing at the roof, the others folded in his palm. He chanted some unintelligible exhortation in a high falsetto, while the sheriff addressed the still struggling and cursing Fitzhai. ‘You are fortunate, partly because we acknowledge that you are a Norman and have taken the cross to fight in the Holy Land.’

Fitzhai spat contemptuously at the vat, his spittle hissing into vapour as it hit the hot metal. ‘Fortunate! A bloody strange way you have of regarding my virtues.’

De Revelle ignored this. ‘You could have been made to carry the hot bar or walk the ploughshares. This ordeal of boiling water is the mildest of all.’ He pointed at the bubbling surface. ‘You must know well enough what is to be done. You will reach to the bottom of the bucket, using your right arm to your armpit, to seek the stone that lies on the bottom. You will take it out and drop it upon the ground.’

Fitzhai went pale as time ran out without reprieve, but when hope had gone, he was brave enough, except for one thing. ‘I beseech you, not my right arm! Let me use the left.’

Richard de Revelle stared at him in surprise. ‘What difference does it make, man?’

The priest stopped chanting his dirge to say, ‘It must be the right arm. It is always the right arm.’

John de Wolfe, a soldier himself, knew well why the victim made the request. ‘He’s a fighting man, he makes his living by battle. Ruin his sword arm and he’ll have no means of livelihood.’

Fitzhai looked gratefully at the coroner, who seemed to have a trace of sympathy with him.

The sheriff was impatient with these trivia. ‘Use whatever damned arm you please! Now off with your tunic and shift.’

The imminence of agony again broke his self-control and, against his struggling, the guards pulled off his upper clothing, leaving Fitzhai’s torso, rippling with muscle, naked in the flickering torchlight. He stood shivering with fearful anticipation while the priest again stopped chanting and began to speak. ‘You will remove the stone from the water, as is ordained by the usage of the Holy Church. Your guilt or innocence of the crime with which you are suspected will be determined by the preservation of your arm. If you are innocent, God will protect it, if not, the signs of scalding will be apparent.’ Though John had witnessed ordeals before, the futility of the ritual was too much for him to remain silent.

‘How can the signs not become apparent, if the fellow has to grope around in a bucket of boiling water?’

De Boterellis looked coldly at him. ‘Are you questioning the wisdom of the Holy Father’s pronouncements on a Christian purpose that has existed since time immemorial?’

Fortunately, John had the sense not to pursue the matter – even the King’s coroner was not immune to charges of sacrilege.

‘That’s enough of this delay,’ snapped the sheriff. ‘Get on with it.’

He stood aside and the Precentor made the sign of the cross over the bucket, mirrored by Thomas who skulked in the background.

The guards shoved Fitzhai to the edge of the bucket, where he had a final spasm of cursing and shrinking back from the rim of the vat. One of the soldiers grabbed his left arm and forced it towards the water. At last, accepting the inevitable, the Crusader screamed, ‘Let me be, I’ll do it my way!’

With a wild shout of defiance and despair, he plunged his arm into the bubbling, steaming liquid. Screaming in agony through clenched teeth, he bent so that his shoulder was almost in the water, groping desperately at the bottom, circling the base to find the rock.

With a great cry of agonised triumph, he threw himself sideways to hurl the stone out of the bucket. It flew across the dungeon and bounced off a wall, to lie steaming on the muddy floor.

Fitzhai crumpled to the ground, keening in pain and attempting to shield his scalded arm with his good one. Thomas de Peyne was quietly vomiting against the wall, until John curtly told him to pull himself together and make a record of the event.

The sheriff and the Precentor murmured together in low voices while the men-at-arms, as sympathetically as they could without attracting the attention of Ralph Morin or the sheriff, lifted Fitzhai from the floor. They supported him while the gaoler shuffled across with a few handfuls of fresh hay and some rags. Well used to these mutilating ordeals, he studied the burned arm with clinical interest, inspecting the fiery red skin, the early swelling and loosening of the surface layer.

Spreading the hay over the limb, which worsened the excruciating agony of the victim, he wound the grubby rags around the arm to hold it in place.

Thomas de Boterellis stopped muttering to the sheriff and addressed Fitzhai, who was now dead white in the face and leaning heavily against one of the soldiers. ‘Your fate will be judged at noon, when the arm will be inspected. A ruddy hue is to be accepted as inevitable and will not deny your innocence. But if Almighty God causes the arm to blister, peel or suppurate, then your guilt is proven.’

‘And you will be hanged!’ added the sheriff robustly.

‘After a trial before the Justices in Eyre,’ snapped John, ‘because the death for which you accuse him of murder was recorded in my rolls before you took him into custody.’

De Revelle gave one his patronising sighs. ‘He goes back into the gaol, whatever is decided about when he is to be hanged.’

‘Prejudging it again, Richard?’ boomed the coroner. ‘The arm has not yet been examined. The miracle of innocence might take place, for all we know.’

The look that the sheriff gave the coroner in response to his jibe suggested strongly that he had as much faith in the Ordeal as John and was looking forward to the hanging.

‘We shall see, Crowner, we shall see.’