A Plague of Heretics

CHAPTER EIGHT

De Wolfe took his big stallion back to Andrew’s stables and, as he came out into the lane, saw his next-door neighbours leaving their front door. Immediately, Cecilia stepped forward and put a hand on his arm.

‘Sir John, how is your brother? Please tell me he is much improved!’

The sincerity in her voice was unmistakable; it was not just a polite remark. John explained that he had ridden down there again and would be going again next day, hoping to hear better news.

‘I am most appreciative of your accompanying me, doctor,’ he said to Clement. ‘My mother and sister also were gratified to have a physician examine William, especially as it took much of your valuable time.’

‘You are welcome. It was the least I could do at such a difficult time,’ replied the doctor. ‘Now Cecilia and I are off to make our devotions at St Olave’s,’ he added. ‘We are most grateful to your wife for introducing us to that excellent place of worship. In fact, we are having a meeting of the congregation there with the good priest Father Fulk, to discuss how we can best encourage the cathedral authorities to pursue this scandal of the heretics with the utmost vigour!’

He spoke with vibrant enthusiasm, his eyes glinting as he anticipated his vigilante role in ‘cleansing the stables of the temple’, as he had described it to his wife earlier that day.

Cecilia, wrapped against a rising east wind in a hooded mantle of blue velvet lined with white fur, was looking worried, but smiled at John and said she hoped that he would find a great improvement in William’s condition next day. Her husband seized her arm and urged her towards the High Street, but as they went she looked over her shoulder and again gave him an enigmatic smile.

John felt confused about his new neighbours, as his initial dislike of Clement had subsided, particularly after he had so readily agreed to make the overnight visit to see brother William. Though full of his own importance — and too keen on religion for John’s taste — he seemed a good enough man at heart. As for Cecilia, he could not make her out. She played the devoted wife, but his long experience of courting women told him that there was more to her than met the eye — though that was indeed pleasant enough!

He turned towards his own house and there, watching him with a scowl, was Matilda, also muffled up, with skinny Lucille trailing behind her.

‘Ogling our neighbour again, I see!’ she grated as she advanced upon him. ‘Why can’t you leave the sweet lady alone? You must see how it embarrasses her husband.’

John opened his mouth to argue, then closed it again, thinking it not worth the waste of words to spar with her in the street.

‘I’m also off to St Olave’s,’ snapped his wife. ‘Our diligent priest is preaching a sermon this evening about the dangers of heresy.’

‘Why his sudden interest?’ asked John. ‘He never shifted himself before to take up any cause.’

‘It seems the Archbishop of Canterbury has reminded all his clergy that blasphemy and apostasy are becoming rife in the land, another infection imported from France,’ countered his wife. ‘Father Fulk has taken this to heart and is to exhort us to be vigilant in seeking out those who would undermine Christ’s Holy Church. A pity you do not have the same concerns!’

Julian Fulk was the odious fat priest who officiated at St Olave’s, and who was Matilda’s idol. For a time John had suspected that she was in love with him, until he realised that she was incapable of such a secular emotion.

‘Our neighbour more than makes up for my defects,’ grunted John. ‘He seems intent on interfering in the bishop’s duties by organising some protest meeting there.’

Matilda glowered at him. ‘If all townsfolk were as devout and conscientious as Doctor Clement, Exeter would be a far better place,’ she snapped.

‘Why does a physician take such an interest in ecclesiastical affairs?’ John retaliated. ‘Better if he used his energies in offering medical help to those who most need it.’

‘You are so godless yourself, husband, that you cannot conceive of men like Clement who have the interests of our beloved Church at heart!’

Having delivered her rebuke, his wife plodded past him without another glance, so he went indoors to find Mary and get something to eat from her kitchen-shed in the yard. He gave her a kiss in exchange for a platter of eggs fried in butter, followed by some bread, cheese and ale. As he ate and drank, his cook-maid brought him up to date with gossip in the market.

‘The plague seems to have abated in the city,’ she reported. ‘It’s now giving way to heretics as the favourite for the chatter around the stalls and street corners.’

‘What are they saying about it?’ he asked over the rim of an ale-pot.

‘The usual exaggerations! That we are about to be besieged by hordes of pagans reeking of brimstone — and that a few brave canons are waging a war against the forces of evil!’

‘Bloody nonsense!’ grunted her master. ‘The heretics I’ve met seem better Christians than most of us — genuine and sincere, anyway. And they are getting murdered for their faith.’

‘They say that there’s some kind of trial set for this week. Will they hang them or burn them at the stake?’ asked Mary, with a frisson of morbid excitement.

John swallowed a lump of cheese and shook his head irritably. ‘Stupid rumours! The Church itself can do them no harm other than excommunicate them — and I doubt that heretics will care a damn about that.’

Mary frowned at him. ‘Well, you be careful, Sir Crowner! At the onion stall I even heard one man say that you had been seen consorting with a known blasphemer in a friendly fashion.’

John shook his head in wonderment. ‘What a bloody town this is, Mary! You can’t so much as belch without everyone discussing it on the street!’ He assumed that long noses and flapping ears had seen him talking to Adam at the fishmonger’s booth.

After he had eaten, he took Brutus on his usual perambulation to cock his leg everywhere along the familiar route to the Bush Inn. He had arranged to meet his two assistants there when they returned from Wonford, to tell him what they had found.

In spite of Mary’s food, he succumbed to Martha’s insistence that he had something more to eat, and by the time he had devoured a spit-roasted capon, Gwyn and Thomas arrived.

They sat with him at the table by the firepit and Martha brought more food for the two new arrivals, sitting with them as they ate and talked. A large, matronly woman of forty, she had a nimble mind and a tough, courageous spirit, which was just as well, with her husband absent with John de Wolfe for most of the previous twenty years.

Gwyn, between mouthfuls of mutton stew, told the coroner what they had found in Wonford. ‘At least he hadn’t had his tongue cut out,’ added Thomas with a shudder.

‘No, but there was far more violence than was needed to kill him,’ countered Gwyn. ‘I suspect that some of the wounds were made after he was dead, just for spite.’

John mused on what he had just heard. ‘Is this a random killing, nothing to do with our heretics — or is it part of a campaign against them?’

‘He was a poor man, with nothing worth stealing,’ observed Thomas. ‘His toft was little more than a workshop and a room to sleep in. Who would want to kill him for anything other than the same reason as the other two died?’

‘He wasn’t of the same religious persuasion as the pair in the city,’ answered John. ‘He was some sort of Cathar, according to the parish priest. But I agree with you, it would be a great coincidence if it wasn’t connected, especially as he was on the canon’s list of suspects.’

While the other two finished their food, he told them of his attendance at the covert meeting in the barn near Ide. ‘None of them had any notion of who might wish them dead, apart from our friends the canons,’ he said. ‘And even they felt that those ardent priests would hardly stoop to murder, especially as they had just started on their campaign to bring all heretics before the bishop’s court.’

Gwyn scowled. ‘I wouldn’t put anything past those bastards!’

The reason for his unwavering antipathy to everything ecclesiastical remained a mystery to John, but he now pursued another matter. ‘Thomas, tell me more about the way that the Church deals with these people who disagree with their monopoly of religion. Why did Hubert Walter send out that reminder to bishops to be more vigilant?’

Hubert Walter was the king’s Chief Justiciar, the head of the legal system, as well as being Archbishop of Canterbury and the Papal Legate, the Holy Father’s representative in England. In fact, he virtually ruled as regent during the king’s apparently permanent absence at the French wars. John knew him well, as he had been the king’s right-hand man at the Crusade and when Richard was imprisoned in Germany. As the justiciar who introduced the coroner system two years before, their paths had crossed several times since.

The little clerk was in his element at being asked to spill out his knowledge. Gwyn gave an anticipatory groan, but this didn’t deter Thomas.

‘Some years ago, the rise of heresy all across Europe led Pope Lucius to issue a decretal called Ab Abolendum at the Synod of Verona, designed to root out heresy. That was in 1184, but nothing much was done about it until the Cathars, the Waldenses, the Poor Men of Lyons and many other groups became even more widespread and outspoken. So recently the present Pope, through his Legates in each country, has demanded more action from his bishops.’

‘So what can they do about it?’ asked de Wolfe.

Thomas rubbed his hands together in gleeful anticipation of giving another lecture.

‘The decretal obliged the bishops and their officers — the archdeacons and others — to be vigilant in seeking out heretics. They were supposed to preach sermons against heresy several times a year and visit each parish regularly to enquire about it — though this was rarely done. They also were obliged to seek the aid of the secular authorities in enforcing their campaign — people like the sheriffs, burgesses and even the coroners!’

De Wolfe scowled at this, as the last thing he wanted was to get mixed up in some witch-hunt.

‘So what could they do to heretics when they found them?’ asked Martha, who leaned on the table with her chin in her hand, absorbed by Thomas’s story.

‘They were excommunicated, so could not be married or buried in a church, forbidden to hold any public office, could not make a will and could not inherit or pass on their property.’

‘They might as well be outlawed!’ said Gwyn.

‘Exactly! Moreover, anyone else who gave them aid or concealed them was treated in the same way. When found guilty by a church court, they could be turned over to the civil authority for any further punishment that might be thought necessary. I suppose they could be hanged or imprisoned, if the local sheriff felt malicious towards them.’

John stared at the flames flickering from the logs in the fire and wondered if, in time, heretics would feel similar flames licking at their bodies. The zeal of the Roman Church to repress any who challenged their absolute despotism was sufficient for that to eventually happen, he feared. He sighed and turned his attention to other worries.

‘Gwyn, I will go out with you to Wonford in the morning, to see this corpse and hold an inquest. Then we will go straight to Stoke, using the ferry at Topsham. If all goes well, we will be back before nightfall.’

There was little to be done at Wonford except to pull out the knife from Hengist’s belly and look at the other wounds. The smell on his body from his sojourn in the privy-pit had abated a little overnight, and Gwyn and the bailiff dragged up his thin tunic to expose the injuries. They saw that the knife was a curved blade set in a rounded cylinder of wood for a handle.

‘This is surely from his own workshop,’ said Robert. ‘There are others there with exactly the same sort of crude hilt. He probably made them himself to cut and shape the leather.’

On the chest and belly were six stab wounds, all of a size consistent with the same knife. In addition, John’s probing finger found an area above his left ear which was swollen and boggy. When he pressed it, he could feel the crackling of the edges of broken bone grating together.

Rocking back on his heels, he rubbed the blood and filth from his fingers on the nearby grass and weeds. ‘He wasn’t stabbed in his cottage, for there’s no sign of blood there. He must have been struck this severe blow on the head to stun him, then dragged outside, his heels making those marks on the floor.’

‘Then brought here and stabbed — or stabbed on the way,’ completed Gwyn.

‘There’s very little blood coming from the belly, so he may well have been dead by then, as it didn’t bleed much,’ noted the coroner, getting to his feet. ‘But that doesn’t help in telling us who did it.’

‘Could only one man have hit him, dragged him out and brought him here?’ asked the bailiff. ‘It’s half a mile from his toft.’

‘One man couldn’t have dragged him that distance,’ said John confidently. ‘But he might have had a horse, so that he could throw him across the saddle and walk him here.’

‘It must have been during the night or they would have been seen,’ said Gwyn.

They stood in silence for a moment, looking down at the corpse.

‘That still doesn’t help in finding the killer,’ growled de Wolfe. ‘So let’s get on with the inquest and see if anyone knows anything — though I doubt it.’

As he anticipated, the inquest was a frustrating formality. The dozen men that the bailiff had rounded up from the manor stood around the cadaver while John officiated, but no one had heard anything during the nights of the past week. The harness-maker’s croft and workshop was at the edge of the village, so when he was dragged out and taken away to the abandoned cottage, he would not have had to pass any of the other dwellings. The jury, directed sternly by the coroner, unhesitatingly brought in a verdict of murder, and John handed over the sad corpse for burial. The two sons claimed it rather reluctantly, for the parish priest was unwilling to allow it to be buried in the churchyard.

‘He is a heretic and a sinner, a blasphemer cursed by God and man!’ brayed Father Patrick angrily.

John walked up to him and bent down to glare directly into his face, his hawk-like nose almost touching the red bulbous one of the Irishman.

‘Listen, priest! No court, not of Church nor king, has pronounced Hengist to have been a heretic. If you don’t find him a nice quiet corner of your churchyard to rest in, I’ll take you back to Exeter and drag you before your archdeacon, John of Alençon, understand? He’ll tell you what you can and can’t do in this diocese.’

He was bluffing, as for all he knew the archdeacon would agree with Patrick, but the bluster worked and with a shrug the priest walked away.

‘But don’t expect me to hold a burial service over him,’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘For all I care, he can rot in purgatory for the next thousand years!’

The rest of the day was uneventful, though worrying and depressing for de Wolfe, who was so concerned for his brother. From Wonford he rode with Gwyn to Topsham, the little port on the estuary of the Exe, where they were poled across the river with their horses on the flat-bottomed ferry. From there it was an easy canter across the flat lands to Dawlish, where de Wolfe steeled himself once again to ride past Hilda’s house. On his last visit to Stoke-in-Teignhead, he had arranged for a message to be sent to Holcombe, to tell the reeve to let his daughter know that he was avoiding her, because of the risk of carrying the yellow plague. It was almost two weeks since he had last seen her, and he yearned for her company.

At Stoke they found little change in William’s condition, though his fever had abated and his skin and eyes were slightly less yellow.

‘I am concerned that he is passing almost no water,’ said their mother, looking drawn and tired with worry. ‘That nice apothecary you brought said that we were to try to make him drink more, but it is very difficult.’

‘William still does not have his wits,’ added Evelyn. ‘He seems to sleep most of the time, and sometimes seems to know us, but it is hard to force food and drink between his lips.’

When John went in to sit with his brother for a time, there was nothing he could do but crouch on a stool alongside his pallet and watch his shallow breathing and closed eyes. There was a strange smell about him, which seemed to come from his breath rather than his sweat.

Sadly, he compared this wreck of a man with the robust, active man he had always known. Several years older than John, he had a marked resemblance to him, both in height, coloration and features, but he lacked John’s habitual stern and grim expression, being a placid and even-tempered man. Unlike some brothers, these two had always got along amicably, and John was very fond of William, making the present situation all the more difficult to bear. He sat for an hour or two, while his mother and sister had a well-earned respite from their vigil. Eventually, they came back to keep him company at the bedside, until a meal was prepared in the hall outside.

‘He has been hiccuping now and then,’ reported John, mainly for something neutral to say. His mother nodded.

‘The poor boy has been doing that for the past day or so,’ she said. ‘His breath smells peculiar, too. I wish I knew what more could be done for him.’

John had no useful suggestions, and Evelyn, a most religious woman, provided the only remedy by endlessly passing rosary beads through her fingers as her lips soundlessly prayed for her brother’s life. The evening passed slowly, John helping his mother and one of the servants to clean William’s body and to struggle a new bed-shirt over his limp limbs. William muttered a few incomprehensible words when he was disturbed, but he was in a stupor, if not actually a coma, and did not respond to any questions or attempts to rouse him.

At dawn the situation was unchanged and reluctantly John and Gwyn saddled up after a good breakfast and prepared to head for home. As his mother came to say farewell in the bailey outside the house, her tears touched John’s heart, for he was aware that both of them were afraid that William would not survive.

‘At least there have been no more deaths in the manor — nor new cases for a week,’ she said, wiping her eyes and nose with a kerchief. ‘And there have been none at all in Holcombe, thanks be to Christ and His Virgin Mother.’

He kissed her and his sister, who was also weeping silently, and with a promise to return in a couple of days he left with a subdued Gwyn riding alongside him. As the tide was in, they crossed the river by another ferry further upstream near Combe-in-Teignhead, and then made their way eastwards along the coast road.

‘Strange how this bloody illness hits one village and not another,’ ruminated Gwyn. ‘Holcombe has had no trouble at all.’

He waved an arm to the left, where that manor lay just off the track, and John wondered if his officer was trying to hint at something. By the time they were in sight of Dawlish, a short distance further on, he had made up his mind.

‘I’ll speak to Hilda, but not come within coughing distance!’ he announced.

In the little port, fishing boats were drawn up on the beach and larger vessels on the banks of the small river that came down from the hills behind Dawlish. At this stream, they turned off and found a short backstreet, parallel with the high road. Among the few houses there, one stood out by being both stone-built and larger than the rest. It had two stone columns at the front supporting an arch over a large door. Hilda’s late husband, shipmaster Thorgils the Boatman, had modelled it on one he saw at Dol, in Brittany.

They reined in before the house, and Gwyn slid off his big mare to knock loudly on the door. Then he went back and climbed back into his saddle before Hilda’s young maid Alice answered.

‘Call your mistress to an upper window,’ commanded John.

A moment later one of the upstairs shutters flew back and Hilda leaned out, a shawl thrown around her shoulders in the keen morning air. She was a lovely woman, her honey-coloured hair falling down her back, unfettered in her own house by any cover-chief.

‘John, you must come in! I do not fear you bringing any contamination to me!’

He shook his head stubbornly. ‘This is as near as I must come, though God knows I would wish to have my arms around you!’

‘I had your message through my father,’ she called. ‘It is tragic what has happened in Stoke.’

John gave her the latest unhappy news from his brother’s manor and they talked for some time across a gap of twenty paces.

‘There have been no more attacks of the yellow plague in Stoke for a week, so we hope it has passed. But it seems that it has damaged William badly.’

Hilda offered to go to his mother to help nurse William, but John forbade it. ‘You are a good woman, my love, but there is nothing you can do there that cannot be carried out by Evelyn and my mother. I would worry myself to my own early grave if I knew you were putting yourself at risk.’

Hilda pulled the shawl more closely around her against the cool morning air, and leaned further over the window sill, as if trying to get nearer to her lover.

‘Now that the distemper seems to have passed, then it must soon be safe for you to visit me, John. I have missed you so much!’

They talked for a few more moments but, aware that their public conversation was starting to attract the attention of neighbours and passers-by, John reluctantly felt that he had to say goodbye, with a promise to call again within a few days. The two horsemen wheeled their steeds around and Hilda waved until they were out of sight, then the shutter closed.