A Plague of Heretics

CHAPTER TWO

John de Wolfe went out into the cold wind and the crowded streets, this time walking to Carfoix near where Thomas had had his hair cut and seen his heretic. The coroner marched across and down the slope of Fore Street, past the tiny church of St Olave’s, where his wife worshipped almost every day. Then he turned left into even narrower lanes and came out into Smythen Street, where his brother-in-law owned a small college which taught logic, mathematics and theology to a handful of earnest young men.

Further down, a side turning crossed some weed-filled land which had lain barren for several years since fire destroyed a row of wooden houses. Now logically known as Idle Lane, the only structure left was a stone-built tavern, the Bush. Since he had returned from the Crusade four years ago, this inn had been as much a part of John’s life as his own house. It was here that his former mistress Nesta had reigned as landlady until she left for Wales to get married. Now Gwyn’s wife Martha was in charge, as John had bought the inn and set them up to run it for him.

He ducked his head to enter the low front door, set in a whitewashed wall under a steep thatched roof. The whole of the ground floor was a single ale-room, with a large loft above where straw pallets provided lodging for anyone wishing to spend the night. The Bush was one of Exeter’s most popular inns, with a reputation for good food, excellent ale and clean mattresses. A large heap of logs glowed in the firepit near the centre of the room, the smoke finding its way out through the eaves under the edge of the thatch, which was barely above head height. The eye-watering atmosphere was compounded by the smell of cooking, sweat and spilled ale, but unlike many of the other alehouses in the city there was no stench of urine and the rushes on the floor were changed regularly.

He made his way to his usual seat, a bench at a table near the firepit, sheltered from the draughts from the door by a shoulder-high wicker hurdle. His bottom had hardly touched the bench when an old man materialised, sliding a pottery ale-jar in front of him, filled with a quart of the Bush’s finest brew.

‘God and His Blessed Son be with you, Sir John!’ bleated Edwin, the tavern’s ‘potboy’, though he was well past sixty. An old soldier, he had lost an eye and was crippled in one leg from wounds suffered in Ireland. Usually, he called the coroner ‘captain’ in deference to his military reputation, but Gwyn had told John that he had recently become very religious, probably as an insurance against hellfire as he felt his final years approaching. Now Edwin eschewed all mention of warfare and violence, mouthing pious platitudes instead, much to the ribald amusement of many of the Bush’s patrons, who for years past had been used to his barrack-room oaths and blasphemies.

‘Gwyn’s out in the yard. I’ll tell him you’re here,’ he said as he moved off with some empty mugs, his collapsed and whitened eye rolling horribly as he tried to wink at the coroner.

John settled down to enjoy his quart, nodding to acquaintances and exchanging a word with others he knew, who were seated at the few tables scattered around the room. Almost everyone in Exeter knew de Wolfe by sight. He was admired as an ex-Crusader and respected as one of the few honest officials in the county. Not a few feared him, as though he was an almost obsessional champion of justice he was not a man to cross, as he came down hard on any wrongdoing.

A moment later Martha bustled in through the back door, which led to the cook-shed, the brewing hut and the laundry, set outside in the muddy yard at the rear, which they shared with the privy, the pigsty and the chicken run. Gwyn’s wife was a large, matronly woman, brisk and efficient in spite of her bulk, which was emphasised by her voluminous dress of brown wool, covered by a tent-like linen apron. She had a broad, genial face, already lined from forty years of hard work. A fringe of iron-grey hair hung below the linen cloth that enveloped her head, but her small, dark eyes were as bright as buttons.

‘Sir John, can I get you some victuals?’ she demanded in her broad Cornish. ‘We’ve a new smoked ham — none the worse for coming from your brother-in-law’s piggery!’

John grinned up at her amiable face. ‘I’ve only just heard about his venture with hogs and sows. Let’s hope he’s better at making bacon that he was at being sheriff!’

He declined the offer of a meal, saying that as it was approaching noon he would soon have to go back to Martin’s Lane, where Mary, his cook-maid, would have prepared his dinner.

As Martha moved away to greet her other patrons with her easy manner, de Wolfe was reminded of how Nesta used to do the same, both of them able to chaff and tease their customers without giving offence, but also capable of dealing firmly with those who had drunk too much and became either overfamiliar or aggressive. The thought of his former Welsh mistress made him pensive for a moment, as she so often used to share this very same bench with him, as well as the little room directly overhead in the loft, where they had spent so many tender and passionate hours.

Suddenly, Gwyn was looming over him, rubbing his spade-like hands on a cloth. ‘Sure you’ll not have a bite to eat, Crowner?’

John shook his head, then sniffed at a strong smell of ale that exuded from his officer. ‘God’s bones, man, have you been drinking the inn dry? I thought you were still up at the castle?’

The ginger giant grinned. ‘I’ve just come back down to start off a new tub of mash. Haven’t touched a drop of ale since breakfast! What you smell is the fruit of my new career — apart from being the coroner’s officer,’ he added hastily. ‘My good wife has appointed me brew-master. A job made for me in heaven!’

He explained how he was now in charge of making the ale, except when called away on coroner’s duties. ‘I’m sticking to the recipe that dear Nesta used to use. Everyone says she made the best ale in Exeter, so I see no reason to change.’

Once again, the spectre of the woman he had loved rose up, but John was nothing if not a realist. Hilda of Dawlish was equally dear to him now, and the very thought of her made him eager to throw himself on to his horse and canter off down to the coast to see her. Even the dozen miles that separated them were far too many. She refused to move to Exeter, even though he could well afford to find another house for her. Matilda was entrenched in Martin’s Lane, so he seemed doomed to pound the road to Dawlish, back and forth like the shuttle in a loom.

His reverie was broken when he realised that Gwyn was talking to him again.

‘I’ve just heard a rumour that some folks down in Bretayne have fallen sick with the yellow plague. If that’s true, then it’s getting uncomfortably close to us.’ John noticed that the low murmur of talk in the taproom had suddenly altered. There seemed to be a wave of more urgent conversation sweeping across the few dozen customers, people huddling closer to hear the news brought in by a couple of porters who had just arrived.

‘Are we keeping clear of it, if there are deaths, Crowner?’ asked Gwyn, worried about his wife and two young sons.

‘Unless there’s anything untoward about any of them,’ said John reassuringly. Though there was no written law on the matter, the vague declaration of the king’s justices in September two years ago, which had set up the office of coroner, had been refined piecemeal by the judges ever since when problems had arisen. It seemed clear that while murder, accident, suicide and sudden or suspicious deaths fell within the coroner’s purview, the majority of deaths from obvious disease or old age were excluded, as long as they occurred in the presence of the family. A few of the men in the ale-room were now rising and making for the door, with worried expressions on their faces.

‘Best get home and warn my wife and daughters,’ said one as he passed, a shoemaker whom John recognised. ‘Tell them to keep indoors until we know the truth of this tale.’

De Wolfe could well appreciate how easily panic could spread in a closed city like Exeter, where more than four thousand people were packed together inside a few acres within the walls. He downed the rest of his ale and got to his feet.

‘Perhaps that’s good advice, Gwyn,’ he said. ‘Keep your boys at home for now, until we hear whether this is just some false rumour.’

He realised that it was a rather futile gesture, given that Gwyn and his family lived in one of the most popular taverns in the city, where outsiders and strangers were coming and going all the time, possibly bringing contagion with them. Something Hugh de Relaga had said that morning came back to him.

‘Maybe I will have a word with that quack who’s come to live as my neighbour,’ he muttered as he swung his cloak about his shoulders and went out into the city streets, which suddenly seemed to have a menacing feel about them.

Meal-times had never been a very cheerful occasion in the de Wolfe household, but since John had returned from Westminster they had all the charm of a funeral. Matilda, already in a chronic state of sulky depression, had been bitterly disappointed when her husband had voluntarily given up his appointment as Coroner of the Verge. At a stroke, she had been deprived of the chance to live at court and flaunt John’s position as coroner to the Royal Household, a position granted to him personally by King Richard — though John would have considered ‘thrust upon him’ more accurate than ‘granted’. Now, as they sat in the gloomy hall which occupied almost all of the high, narrow house in Martin’s Lane, she tried to behave as if her husband did not exist. Each sat at the opposite ends of the long oaken table, concentrating on the food brought in by Mary, the dark-haired young woman who was their cook and maid of all work about the house. Matilda had her own personal handmaiden, if such a title could be used for Lucille, a skinny, snivelling girl from the Vexin in northern Normandy.

As Mary placed a wooden bowl of mutton stew in front of her master, she gave him a surreptitious wink, for she was more of a wife to him than Matilda. She cooked his food, washed his clothes, cleaned his house, listened to his woes — and in the past, on occasion, had even lain with him.

When she left the hall to go through the small vestibule and around the outside passage to her cookhouse in the backyard, the only sound left was the steady champing of jaws, for Matilda’s moods never seemed to affect her appetite. John now and then attempted to start a conversation, though his wife usually only opened her mouth to complain or to deride him.

He had almost given up trying to revive any intercourse between them, as his efforts were usually met with a snub or ridicule — or more often just stony silence. De Wolfe knew full well that she had a long-term strategy to punish him, not only for his infidelities, but for his destruction of her adoration of her brother Richard. John had, in the course of his duties as a law officer, repeatedly exposed de Revelle as a charlatan and traitor, until eventually he was ignominiously dismissed as sheriff of Devon. And now, of course, the final indignity was his depriving her of her moment of glory as wife of the coroner to the king’s court.

Mary returned to clear away the bowls and place before each of them a thick trencher of yesterday’s bread carrying a trout grilled with almonds. When she had refilled their pewter cups from a jug of Burgundian wine and departed through the draught-screen, John made a new effort to break the oppressive silence, this time at least with some useful motive in mind.

‘There is talk of the yellow distemper arriving in the city,’ he began. ‘I hear that a family in Bretayne may be affected, so perhaps it might be wise if you kept clear of St Olave’s until more definite news is known.’

Matilda’s favourite church was on the edge of Bretayne, the worst slum area of Exeter. It was so named because centuries ago the invading Saxons had pushed the Celtic British inhabitants out of the higher parts of the city down into the less desirable north-west corner of the Roman walls.

The mention of her beloved St Olave’s forced his wife out of her sullen silence. ‘I’ll not be dissuaded from attending the House of God by some fever,’ she snapped.

‘It would be wiser to find some other House of God while this danger lasts,’ he said mildly. ‘Why not stick to the cathedral?’

To his credit, it did not even cross his mind that if Matilda succumbed to the plague it would solve many of his problems.

‘The Lord will protect me and those who worship Him in the face of adversity,’ she said sententiously. ‘What is this ailment that people are speaking of, anyway? We have managed to survive all the fevers and sweats over the years, as well as the gripes that turn one’s bowels to water!’

‘It’s the yellow distemper, woman,’ he said impatiently. ‘It was well known in former days but has not been seen for many years.’

The topic, for once, seemed to catch Matilda’s attention. ‘What causes it, then?’ she demanded. ‘And is there any cure?’

John picked some fine fish bones from his tongue before answering. ‘No one knows where it came from, but many suspect that it is brought in from abroad by ship-men. For it to appear inside the city is a new departure. Some blame rats for spreading it, but I can’t see why foreign rats should come within the walls of Exeter.’

She had fallen silent again and, as John raised his wine-cup to wash down the remaining bones, he looked across at her, wondering why fate had cast them together. She was a stocky, thickset woman with a square face and a mouth like a rat-trap. In the house she wore no cover-chief, and her wiry brown hair looked like the head of a mop, in spite of Lucille’s efforts to tame it with a brush and tongs.

He made an effort to start the sparse conversation again. ‘I thought to ask our new neighbour if he has any opinions on the matter. Maybe as a physician he has some advice about avoiding the contagion.’

This immediately revived his wife’s interest. Apart from anything connected with food, drink and the Church, social advancement was her major concern. ‘Doctor Clement? Yes, he would be aware of all there is to be known about it. His wife told me that he had attended two of the best medical schools in Europe,’ she enthused.

Her small eyes suddenly narrowed as she glared at her husband.

‘But you told me that you did not much care for him, you barbarian!’ she snapped. ‘We at last get a respectable next-door neighbour, instead of a murderer, and you snub him!’

John capitulated; it was the easiest path. ‘Well, he’s not so bad, I suppose, if he dropped a little of his airs and graces. His wife is a handsome woman, I’ll admit.’

Matilda snorted. ‘Trust you to notice a good-looking woman! Don’t you get any of your usual lecherous ideas about her; she’s a most devout and chaste lady.’

She attacked the rest of her trout fiercely, wielding her small eating-knife as if she were cutting out her husband’s heart with a dagger. After a further long silence, she abruptly restarted the stilted conversation.

‘If you really want to talk to the doctor, I’ll invite them in for supper tonight. I doubt I can get that lazy, useless maid of ours to prepare a decent meal, but as you refuse to get anyone better, we’ll just have to put up with her.’

De Wolfe went back to Rougemont after his dinner and again went to see Henry de Furnellis in his chamber in the keep. On the way he met Thomas de Peyne, who was coming out of the tiny garrison chapel of St Mary in the inner ward, and learned from him that there was indeed an outbreak of the yellow plague in Bretayne.

‘Five dead and several more very sick in a couple of huts just below St Nicholas Priory,’ he reported. ‘They are digging a grave pit in St Bartholomew’s churchyard, rather than risk hauling the corpses over to the cathedral Close.’

The cathedral had normally enforced a monopoly of all burials in the city, even though there were twenty-seven other churches within the walls. John was already on his way to talk to the sheriff about this new hazard and Thomas’s news only made it the more urgent. In a city where the inhabitants were packed in so closely together, there was a real danger of a widespread epidemic. He said as much to the grizzled old warrior when he reached his office.

‘Henry, is there anything we can do to lessen the risk of this plague taking a hold in the city?’

The sheriff shrugged, his weathered face wrinkled in despondency. ‘Years ago I saw disease rampage through a town in France. Nothing seemed to stop it, even burning down the afflicted houses. Though that wasn’t this yellow curse, it was vomiting and flux of the bowels.’

John shook his head. ‘This is different. Their skin and eyes go yellow, almost green in some cases. I’m going to do what you suggested, have a word with this new physician; maybe he has some more modern ideas.’ He scratched an itching point in his scalp. ‘I don’t care for the fellow, but this is too serious a situation to pass up anything that might help.’

‘What about this rat business that people are talking about?’ asked de Furnellis. ‘Should we start a war against the little bastards?’

De Wolfe shrugged. ‘God’s guts, Henry! There are a hell of a lot more rats than people in Exeter. You’d need an army of rat-catchers and dogs to clear out half of them.’

The sheriff sadly agreed. ‘I take it you needn’t get involved with inquests down in Bretayne, John?’

De Wolfe shook his head. ‘This is a doctor’s business, not a coroner’s! Let’s hope more cold weather will kill whatever poison that’s causing it.’

As he went down the wooden steps from the first-floor entrance to the keep, he could certainly vouch for the cold weather. The east wind had risen more strongly and was moaning through the battlements on the top of the castle wall. There was no snow, but patches of ice glistened on the ground, where water had frozen in the ruts formed by cartwheels and horses’ hooves.

To avoid going home, he sat for a while in his lofty chamber, but in spite of the small charcoal brazier which stood on a slab of stone on the wooden floor, the cold soon drove him out. He left Thomas there, muffled up in an old Benedictine habit over his thin cassock, as he sat at the table carefully penning the last of the parchment rolls for presentation at the Shire Court next day.

‘Don’t stay too long, lad,’ he said kindly as he lifted the hessian draught-curtain. ‘I don’t want to come here in the morning and find your corpse frozen to that stool!’

Back at Martin’s Lane, he hung his cloak on a wooden peg in the small vestibule behind the front door and sat on the solitary bench to pull off his boots. Though today he had only been walking around the city, he had worn his riding boots to try to keep his feet warm. With a pair of soft house-shoes on his feet, he opened the door to the hall and went into its gloomy cavern, relieved to find that Matilda was not there, only his dog sleeping by the fire. He went across to the hearth, which was his pride and joy, being copied from a house he had seen in Dol in Brittany. Instead of the usual central firepit, with its smoke rising into the room to water the eyes and irritate the throat, he had replaced the back wall of the wooden hall with stone and had a conical chimney added, which took the fumes up through the roof.

There was a good fire of oak logs burning across the iron dogs in the hearth, and with a sigh of contentment he sank into a wooden monks’ chair, rather like an upright coffin, with a high back and side wings to divert the draughts. Giving his old hound Brutus a friendly prod with his foot so that he could drag his seat a little nearer the flames, he stretched out his long legs on to the stone slabs of the hearth.

A moment later the latch rose on the door, but he was happy to see that it was Mary rather than his wife.

‘I thought I heard you come in,’ she said, almost accusingly. ‘The mistress has gone to church. I’ll mull you some ale.’

She spoke in English, heavily accented with the local Devon dialect. Her mother was a fair Saxon, but from her own dark hair, her father was probably a stranger. No one knew who he might have been, as he only stayed for the conception.

She brought him a heavy pottery mug, filled with ale from a pitcher on a side table and thrust a red-hot poker into it, which she had left in the fire in anticipation of his return.

When the sizzling had subsided, he sipped it appreciatively.

‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Mary,’ he said sincerely. ‘If it was left to my dear wife, I’d starve and go around in rags.’

‘I’m glad to see you back from London, that’s all I know,’ she retorted. ‘I lived here alone for months, worried that you’d never come back and I’d be thrown out into the street.’

John cupped his hands around the mug to warm them. ‘I told Matilda not to go down to that damned church — it’s too near Bretayne, now that there’s been an outbreak of the sickness there. You watch out, too, my girl!’

‘And how am I going to do that, pray?’ she snorted. ‘I have to go out to market every morning to see that you are fed. In fact, I’ll have to go out again now, as the mistress wants some fancy food to give those people this evening.’

She went back to her kitchen, Brutus following her, as he decided that the possibility of some scraps outweighed the attractions of a good fire. John sat with his ale, looking around the hall, whose interior rose right up to the rafters that supported the high roof of wooden shingles. The walls, partly wooden planks and partly wattle-and-daub panels inside heavy oak frames, were hung with faded tapestries, their indistinct patterns showing biblical scenes. There was a window low down on the street wall, glassless but covered with yellowed linen inside the hinged shutters. The floor was flagstoned, a novelty insisted upon by Matilda, who considered the usual rushes strewn over beaten earth too common for her station in life.

Soon, the warmth of the fire and the quart of ale combined to send him into a peaceful sleep, where he dreamed of his boyhood down near the coast at Stoke-in-Teignhead, where his mother, sister and elder brother still lived at their manor. William, his brother, was a totally different character from John, though he looked remarkably like him. He had never been a warrior like his younger brother and was devoted to managing their two estates of Stoke and Holcombe, especially since his wife and infant had died in childbirth a few years earlier. Under the will of their long-deceased father, a quarter of the income of the manors came to John, with which he was well content.

The scenes in his mind shifted to their other demesne a few miles away at Holcombe, where he had first become enamoured with Hilda, the daughter of the manor-reeve. In the way that dreams do, the scene suddenly jumped forward a quarter of a century, and as he dozed before his hearth he found himself locked in a passionate embrace with the beautiful blonde until the clatter of the door latch jerked him back to the present. It was Mary, ushering in the large figure of Gwyn.

‘Your man is here to see you,’ she announced. ‘He’s brought you some work, by the sound of it.’

She slipped out again and his officer advanced to the hearth. John knew that Mary must have assured him that Matilda was not at home, or he would not have ventured into the house. Relations between the two were frosty in the extreme, and Matilda usually referred to Gwyn as ‘that Cornish savage’, typical of her Norman disdain of anyone who had Celtic blood — which included her husband, whose mother was half-Welsh.

‘We’ve got a murder, Crowner,’ he proclaimed with almost a gleeful air. ‘A real nasty one, too.’

John rubbed the last of the sleep from his eyes and hauled himself out of his chair. ‘Where is it? If I’m taken out of town and miss these folk coming in from next door, I’ll never hear the last of it from her.’

Gwyn shook his head, his wild auburn locks shaking like the head of a sheaf of corn. ‘Not more than a few hundred paces away! Just this side of the East Gate, in Raden Lane.’

John followed him out of the hall and shrugged on his cloak and a pair of boots, while his henchman gave him some details.

‘A pair of urchins found him, lying in weeds down a narrow alley between two houses. I went up for a quick look after Osric came down to the Bush to look for you.’ Osric was one of the two constables charged by the city council with the arduous task of trying to keep the peace in Exeter’s crowded streets. The coroner and his officer were out in the lane now and facing the biting east wind as they made for the East Gate.

‘So who is he and how did he die?’ snapped John, knowing that Gwyn was wont to make a short story into a long one.

‘I don’t know who he is, for in the state he’s in his own mother would be hard put to recognise him!’

‘So he was beaten up?’ demanded John.

‘Not that simple, Crowner!’ replied Gwyn with relish. ‘He’s had his throat cut and his tongue ripped out!’

De Wolfe’s black eyebrows rose at this. Though he had seen far more horrible mutilations in campaigns across Europe and the Levant, this was unusual in the remote lands of Devon. However, he held back more questions until they reached the scene. Raden Lane was in the most elite part of the city, on the south side of the High Street just before the road ended at the eastern gate. There were a score of large houses there, occupied mostly by rich merchants and burgesses — it was as far away from Bretayne as possible, both geographically and socially.

The two men turned into Raden Lane, where some of the houses were stone-built, set back on plots a short way from the street. Others were made of wood or cob and were flush with the edge of the narrow lane. They were close together but had slim gaps between them, and one of these, halfway up on the left, was an actual path, overgrown with winter-dead weeds. Its sides were formed by the wooden fence-stakes of the houses on either side.

‘He’s up here, Crowner,’ said Gwyn, pushing ahead of him through shrivelled dock-leaves and withered coarse grass. In spite of being a path, it no longer went anywhere, as beyond the long back gardens it had been cut off by a high fence that faced St John’s Hospital near the city wall. No doubt its isolation from lack of use had led to its being chosen as a dumping ground for a murdered corpse.

As the coroner followed Gwyn up the narrow corridor, the skirts of his long grey tunic brushing frost from the weeds, he saw figures standing against the tall hurdles of woven hazel-withies which blocked the end. One was the skinny figure of Osric, a painfully thin Saxon, the other his fellow constable, a stocky, rather fat man called Theobald. Both were clutching their long staves and staring down at something on the ground.

The ‘something’ turned out to be a spectacle that could have been used for a church wall-painting depicting the expected terrors of hell for those who sinned. A man’s body lay on its back in the weeds, a molehill under his shoulders throwing the head back to expose a ghastly wound that occupied the whole of his neck, from jawline to collarbones. Most of his face and the upper part of his body was plastered in dried blood, the colour of his tunic being apparent only below his waist. His grey hair was thick with blackening blood clot, and the front end of a deep laceration was just visible above his left ear.

What was even more macabre than his horrific injuries was lying alongside his outstretched right hand. Here a complete tongue and attached voice-box was carefully laid out on a bloody stone, like some piece of offal displayed on a butcher’s stall.

De Wolfe stood silently for a moment, contemplating the awful sight. The two constables, though also hardened to blood and gore from dealing with hundreds of street fights and killings, looked rather white around the gills.

‘Never seen anything like this before, Crowner!’ ventured Osric.

‘Any idea who he is?’ demanded John.

The constable shook his head. ‘Not until he’s cleaned up, anyway,’ he muttered. ‘You can’t see his features for blood.’

Osric explained how a lad — or rather his dog — had found him about an hour ago and had run to the constable’s hut behind the Guildhall to raise the alarm. ‘But God knows how long he’s been lying here, as no one comes up this path, for it goes nowhere.’

‘Suggests that whoever did it knows his way around Exeter,’ said Gwyn. ‘He obviously knew of a place where it would be some time before it was discovered.’

‘And how long was that, I wonder?’ grunted the coroner ruminatively. He snapped off a piece of dead twig from a nearby bush and used it to prod the Adam’s apple. It was stuck fast to the flat stone by dried blood. ‘That’s been shed some long time ago, even allowing for the freezing weather.’

Gwyn gave the thigh of the corpse a shove with the toe of his boot and the whole body moved as if carved from stone.

‘Stiff as a board!’ he commented. ‘But given this frost, it doesn’t help much to tell us when he died.’

‘You reckon he’s been here all night?’ asked Theobald, his podgy face starting to recover some colour.

The coroner shrugged. ‘He’s been dead at least for many hours, I’m sure. But he might have been dead for days!’

Gwyn had hunkered down alongside the cadaver and was studying the head.

‘Looks like a real nasty blow there. Shall I shift him so that you can see?’ he asked hopefully. The Cornishman always relished a bit of drama and mayhem.

John waved a hand at the two constables. ‘One of you run around to St John’s,’ he commanded. ‘They’ve got that little mortuary behind the hospital, so ask them if they can send a couple of men with a bier to take him away.’

As Theobald left to do his bidding, John instructed Osric to search the surrounding area to see if he could find any weapon.

‘If he’s had a crack on the head, there may be something lying around that caused it,’ he said, then dropped to his haunches opposite Gwyn and waited for his officer to lift up the head. The corpse was so rigid that it came up like a plank, but John was able to see the back of the head. Though obscured by a welter of blood, a deep laceration ran from above the left ear to the back point, above the nape of the neck. He motioned for his officer to lower the corpse to the ground and stood up, after wiping his soiled fingers on some weeds.

‘I suspect that’s what killed him,’ he growled.

Gwyn nodded in agreement — he was always vying with his master over their expertise in matters of violent death.

‘All this blood has run down, but there’s no sign of spurting,’ he said, waving a hand at the surrounding vegetation. ‘I reckon he had his Adam’s apple cut out after he was dead.’

Before he could enlarge on this macabre observation, there was a cry from down the path and Thomas came hurrying up.

‘I heard in the castle that you had been called up here. What’s going on?’ he demanded. Then his gaze fell on the dreadful apparition on the ground, and without warning the little clerk turned aside and was spectacularly sick against the nearest fence. After two years as the coroner’s scribe, he had largely overcome his sensitivity to the various forms of violent death, but the sight of a bloody tongue and voice-box laid out neatly on a flat stone was too much for him.

‘Better out than in!’ bellowed Gwyn jovially as he slapped Thomas on the back. Then he turned back to de Wolfe and carried on their conversation. ‘There would have been blood splashed six feet away, if that wound had been caused while he was still alive,’ he boomed confidently. ‘I remember seeing a Saracen beheaded outside Acre once — there was a fountain of bright blood as long as my arms could span!’

De Wolfe nodded absently. ‘But it all must have been done here. The corpse wasn’t brought from elsewhere, or there’d be a trail of blood all the way up this lane.’

‘But he could have been hit on the head somewhere else,’ observed Osric, who had rejoined them, after having failed to find anything nearby that could have been a weapon.

‘Must have been, as I can’t imagine anyone coming up this alley of his own free will,’ agreed John.

Thomas de Peyne had recovered his nerve a little and after wiping his face with a kerchief came to stand shakily alongside his master, carefully averting his gaze from the corpse. Jerkily, he made the sign of the cross as if this might ward off the horror.

‘Who is he, Crowner?’ he asked. ‘And who would do a terrible thing like that?’

John shook his head. ‘Can’t answer either of those questions, Thomas. When he’s been cleaned up a bit, hopefully someone will recognise his face, if he’s a local man.’

A few minutes later a couple of lay brothers came up the path, carrying a canvas stretcher supported by two poles. Behind them strode a tall, gaunt figure in a black Benedictine habit. This was Brother Saulf, the infirmarian of the small priory of St John, which was virtually the only place in the city where the poor could get medical attention. The coroner explained the situation and the monk readily agreed to house the cadaver in the lean-to shed at the priory, which acted as a mortuary. As the lay brothers hoisted the corpse on to the stretcher, Thomas joined Saulf in intoning some Latin prayers over it as the best they could do by way of shriving the dead man.

With an old blanket draped over him, and his tongue tucked under his armpit, the victim went off at a jog down the path, the coroner’s trio following more sedately around to St John’s.

It was growing dark by the time de Wolfe arrived back in Martin’s Lane and, inevitably, found his wife in a bad temper at his lateness.

‘Our neighbours will be attending on us in an hour!’ she grated. ‘You had best change into some decent raiment. I don’t want to be disgraced by them thinking we are too poor to have good clothing!’

With a sigh, he went off to the solar where they slept, to rummage in his chest to find something to wear. As everything he had was either grey or black, it was hardly likely to dazzle the popinjay next door, but he was in no mood for a confrontation with Matilda over it.

When he returned, his wife went off to persecute her handmaiden, Lucille. With a face like a rabbit and a timid nature to match, she was servile enough to tolerate Matilda’s bad temper. When her mistress had gone into the convent at Polsloe some months earlier, she had been fobbed off on to Matilda’s sister-in-law, Eleanor de Revelle, but as soon as she returned to Martin’s Lane Eleanor threw her back again like some cast-off slave, with the excuse that she had not been satisfactory.

Lucille lived in a box-like cubicle under the timber supports that held up the solar built on to the back of the house. Now she was hauled out and taken up the outside stairs to primp Matilda’s lacklustre hair and array her in a suitable gown for the entertainment of their supper guests.

Supper was another à la mode innovation of Matilda’s, who had heard that an evening meal was becoming popular with the privileged classes. For centuries, a noon dinner had been the main meal of the day for almost everyone, but she felt obliged to adopt these new fads so that she could parade them before her matronly cronies at St Olave’s.

In due course the physician and his wife arrived and were conducted to a pair of folding leather-backed chairs before the chimneyed hearth, between the two monks’ seats. John gravely provided them with his best wine, served in glass goblets he had looted from a French castle in the Limousin and which came out only on special occasions.

If John had not known his wife so well, he might have thought that she had suddenly turned into a different person. From her usual glowering, sullen manner, the arrival of favoured guests had given her an ingratiating smile and a convincing façade of pleasantry. Her stocky body arrayed in a gown of dark red velvet, she had discarded her head-veil and wimple in favour of a net of gold thread which confined her hair. She also wore a surcoat of blue brocade, as in spite of the large fire the hall was cold and chilly.

Though he had met his neighbours before, albeit briefly, John now had time to study them more closely as they politely sipped their wine and listened to Matilda’s prattle about the cathedral and her little church in Fore Street. Clement was a handsome man, with a patrician face but rather thin lips. A few streaks of grey showed in the dark hair that was cut in the old Norman style, being clipped short around his neck and temples, with a thick bush on top. His manner was precise and rather imperious, suggesting that he did not take kindly to his opinions being questioned. What struck John most, seeing him at close quarters, were his eyes, pale blue and unblinking. They seemed to have a strange intensity, which reminded John of a cat waiting to pounce on some unsuspecting mouse.

Dressed elegantly in a long tunic of bright green linen, with a fur-edged surcoat of deep blue, he looked exactly what he was, a mature professional man who was sure of his position in society. Then, as he refilled Cecilia’s goblet, John — a connoisseur of women — realised anew that Clement’s wife was extremely attractive. Considerably younger than her husband, she was handsome rather than beautiful. About thirty, slim and straight-backed, she wore a cover-chief and wimple of white silk, though enough hair peeped out to show that it was as black as his own. A smooth complexion and full, slightly pouting lips convinced de Wolfe that she was a very desirable addition to the scenery of Martin’s Lane, especially in her elegant gown of black velvet with a gold cord wound around her narrow waist, the tasselled ends dangling almost to the floor. A heavy surcoat of dark green wool was held across her neck by a gilt chain.

Her presence undoubtedly made him less taciturn a host than usual, and he already felt Matilda’s censorious eyes upon him as he fussed over Cecilia’s glass of wine. After the usual platitudes about their health and the prematurely cold weather, the physician turned his attention to the news of the day.

‘Some sad deaths in the city, I hear,’ he observed. His voice was mellow, and John began to wonder if this paragon could have any faults at all.

‘You mean the outbreak of distemper in Bretayne?’ he suggested.

‘And the murder of that woodcarver up in Raden Lane,’ added Clement with a slight note of triumph in his voice at being so abreast of the news.

John was once again amazed at the efficiency of the Exeter grapevine, which seemed to be able to relay news even as it was happening, for it was less than a couple of hours since the identity of the victim had been established. When the face had been rubbed clean of dried blood by the vigorous application of wet rags, Osric was able to recognise him straight away as Nicholas Budd, who had lived alone in a rented room off Curre Street, which was not far away on the north side of the High Street. The two constables, who knew virtually every resident of the city, said that he made a modest living carving wood, both for furniture and especially for religious artefacts for churches or to sell to pilgrims. They knew little else about him, as he was a quiet, withdrawn person, with no relatives that they knew of.

Matilda seized upon the news like a terrier with a rat, as John had not bothered to tell her why he had arrived home late that afternoon.

‘I have heard of the man. He shaped some parts of the rood screen in St Pancras Church,’ she snapped. ‘Why should someone want to murder a devout man like that? He could have no riches to steal.’

Clement and Matilda launched on a somewhat patronising discussion about why the good are struck down while the wicked prosper. John, sitting now in one of the monks’ seats, was content to watch Cecilia, who so far had hardly spoken a word, except for some polite responses to a few questions about how she liked her new life in Exeter.

As he looked across at her profile, the old adage ‘still waters run deep’ came into his mind, and he again had to remind himself that an equally attractive woman awaited him in Dawlish. Cecilia seemed aware of his scrutiny, for she turned her head and gave him a slight, almost secret smile. He thought that she must be well used to men staring at her; it could hardly be otherwise. He was jerked from his daydreaming by her husband speaking to him.

‘Is there any reason why this man should have been fatally attacked?’ he asked. ‘As in any town, there are plenty of drunken brawls and knife fights, but this secret killing must be unusual, even for such a large city as Exeter.’

John raised his shoulders in an almost Gallic gesture. ‘It is too early to say. I sent my officer around to all the houses nearby, to raise the hue and cry, not that it was of any use as the man had been dead for some time. But no one admitted seeing or hearing anything untoward. We can do no more until daybreak tomorrow.’

He kept the nature of the injuries to himself, but saw no harm in enlarging on the circumstances, as doctors heard things that often no one else could pick up, other than priests in the confessional.

‘The victim was severely wounded, so it is probable that the assailant would have been heavily bloodstained. Given this deep frost, it is impossible even to guess at the time of the attack, which must have taken place somewhere else.’

At last, Cecilia joined the conversation. ‘How could someone move a body across the city without being seen?’ she asked. Her voice was low and pleasant, her Norman-French perfect. Though John knew that they could both speak good English — and no doubt the physician was fluent in Latin — Matilda insisted on always speaking French in the house. Though she was born in Devon and had lived all her life there, apart from a couple of trips to distant relatives in Normandy, she insisted on ‘playing the Norman’ on the strength of her de Revelle ancestors.

‘There are plenty of back alleys and, at night, few people about, except around the taverns,’ answered Cecilia’s husband. ‘Maybe you will never find the culprit, though Almighty God knows and will bring him to his proper reckoning when the Great Trump sounds!’ he added piously.

John was more forthright. ‘It must have been possible to move him, for indeed it happened!’ he declared. ‘The dead man was a thin old fellow; he could have been carried quite easily. And for all we know, there might have been more than one assailant.’

Matilda was becoming increasingly fractious at the choice of subject. She wanted to talk of churches, priests and well-known citizens of her acquaintance.

‘Do you have to bring your loathsome work home with you, John?’ she snapped. ‘I’m sure the doctor here does not weary his wife with tales from the sickbed!’

Cecilia smiled faintly but said nothing in response, leaving it to the others to guess whether her husband discussed his patients’ problems with her. However, John was not going to be sidetracked by Matilda, for he needed some information.

‘Doctor Clement, these outbreaks of the yellow plague,’ he began, topping up his guest’s goblet. ‘Have you experience of them elsewhere? There has not been such a murrain for many years, though it seems that some older people recollect them.’

Clement considered this as he sipped his wine. ‘I have never seen this yellow variety, where the bodily humours are stained with bile,’ he admitted. ‘There are many sorts of fever, as everyone knows, and some seem to pass easily from person to person. But this present ailment is outside my experience.’

‘You know there has been an outbreak in the city, with five dead already?’

The physician nodded. ‘I had heard that, but they were down in the poorer area of the town, I understand. Where living conditions are bad, then it seems that whatever poison causes it can spread more easily.’

‘Is there nothing that can be done to limit the spread of this sickness?’ demanded John. ‘With more than four thousand people crammed inside these walls, there could be devastation!’

The physician raised his hands helplessly. ‘As no one knows the cause or how it is spread, what can we do? I think the power of prayer is our only defence. We must throw ourselves on the mercy of God the Father and His Blessed Son and Virgin Mother.’

At this, the doctor crossed himself, reminding de Wolfe of his clerk’s almost obsessional habit — and confirming the fact that Clement of Salisbury was an extremely devout man. Matilda growled in agreement and imitated the physician by making the sign of the cross herself. John noted that Cecilia said nothing and did not join them in their fervent religious gestures.

‘I have heard the plague being blamed on an excess of rats about the place, as is more common in slums like Bretayne,’ he persisted, doggedly determined to squeeze any useful information out of this professional man. Again, he failed to get any satisfaction, for Clement replied that though it was possible, these distempers could arise anywhere, whether there were rats or not. As without exception those ubiquitous vermin were everywhere, this was hardly useful. Even in this house, old Brutus caught at least one every day, usually in the kitchen or yard, but sometimes in this very hall.

Mary came in with the first ‘remove’ of the meal, balancing a tray heaped with food. Matilda, with a scowl at her husband to get him out of his chair, conducted her guests to the long table of dark oak and sat them together on a side bench, while she and John took the one opposite. He promptly rose again to fetch a pitcher of different wine from a side table, and while he was refilling his looted glasses Mary began placing dishes on the table. For a small gathering like this, there were only three removes and each consisted of three dishes, from which the diners could choose what they wanted. Again, Matilda had insisted on using pewter plates instead of the usual trenchers of thick bread. There were horn spoons at each place, but everyone also used the small eating-knife they always carried, together with their fingers. There were bowls of lavender-scented water on the table, together with napkins to wipe their hands. Mary was an excellent cook, though she received nothing but grumbles and criticisms from her mistress. This evening, she had started with pastries filled with beef marrow, a large platter of boiled mutton slices and a brewet of veal pieces with a spiced sauce of pounded crayfish tails.

The physician seemed very fond of his food, and his eyes lit up at the sight of the cook-maid’s efforts. ‘A most attractive menu,’ he enthused as he helped his wife to slices of mutton and a couple of the small pastries.

‘She does her best, poor girl,’ said Matilda deprecatingly, which was an insult to Mary’s prowess, especially as she had to cook everything with the primitive facilities of the shed in the yard, which was also her sleeping quarters.

Eating took precedence over conversation, and the food rapidly vanished. The brewet of veal was especially popular, the sauce being provided in small dishes at each place, into which the diners dipped their right little finger to spread upon the meat. Before the harassed Mary could bring in the next course, there was time for more talk and Clement expounded upon his medical practice.

‘Salisbury was too small to contain an ambitious doctor like me,’ he declaimed. ‘I needed to offer myself to a wider clientele, and Exeter is famed for its burgeoning prosperity.’

‘My husband has a chamber in Goldsmith Street where patients can consult him,’ offered Cecilia, delicately wiping sauce from her finger with a linen cloth. ‘Already he has a substantial practice.’

‘Entirely among the better class of citizen, of course,’ added Clement. Matilda murmured her approval, but John was determined to put a brake upon the doctor’s conceit.

‘Perhaps you could spare some of your undoubted talents to helping the less fortunate as well,’ he suggested. ‘I’m sure that Brother Saulf at St John’s Hospital would welcome your expertise with some of his poor sufferers down there.’

The physician put on a doleful expression. ‘I would like to do that; it would no doubt be an act of Christian charity,’ he said sententiously. ‘But unfortunately my practice is growing so rapidly that I would have little time to spare — but I will try to assist them when circumstances allow.’

He went on to speak more honestly. ‘Also, I fear that my patients, who come from the higher levels of county society, might not look with favour on the possibility of my carrying contagion to them from the legion of ailments from which the poorer classes suffer.’

Matilda nodded in agreement, but de Wolfe again noticed that Cecilia made no effort to support her husband’s selfish attitude.

‘So you also wish to keep well clear of any victims of this yellow distemper?’ observed John with a harder edge to his voice, which made his wife glare at him.

The elegant doctor made a deprecating gesture. ‘What purpose would it serve? There is nothing I or anyone else can do to help. As I said, it is in the hands of God, whose ways are mysterious.’

Any developing dispute was avoided by Mary returning with a large platter of grilled trout and a dish of capons’ legs, which the diners seized upon with relish. The cook-maid took away used dishes and returned with a pudding of rice boiled in milk with saffron and raisins, together with fresh bread, butter and cheese. All this occupied them for a further hour, including John’s further ministrations with a wineskin of white Loire and a flask of strong brandy-wine. When they eventually left for their short walk home, the physician seemed a little unsteady on his feet, but nonetheless effusive with his appreciation of their hospitality. John thought somewhat cynically that his excessive zeal for religion did not diminish his fondness for good food and drink. Cecilia also thanked them, less enthusiastically, but quite charmingly, for their kindness, and for once Matilda was smiling smugly as they at last said their farewells to their guests at the front door. The moment it closed, however, her amiable mask slipped immediately.

‘It would have been a perfect occasion tonight but for your constant ogling of that poor lady!’ she snapped. ‘Cecilia is too refined and genteel to have men like you lusting after her.’

As she turned away from him to lumber off towards the solar and her bed, John felt his fingers aching to settle around her fleshy neck, to release him for ever from her mean-spirited nature.