The Tainted Relic

ACT ONE

Devonshire, 1194

The cargo boat glided up the last half-mile of the mirror-calm river, its single sail tightly furled, the flood tide being sufficient to drift it to its mooring against the quay. Short and stubby, the Mary and Child Jesus sat low in the water, her hold full of casks of wine from Anjou and kegs of dried fruit from Provence. The weather on the return voyage from St-Malo had been kind, unlike the outward trip, when the master had wondered whether he would ever reach harbour alive, with his load of Devonshire wool and Exeter cloth. Thorgils the Boatman, who owned the vessel, as well as being its captain, swore that this was going to be the last trip of the season. November was really too late to be risking the long Channel crossing from the mouth of the Exe to Brittany. After they had discharged their cargo at Topsham, he would take the Mary back the few miles to Dawlish and haul her out on the beach for a refit, then spend the time until Easter in his fine new house with his young blonde wife. The thought warmed him in spite of the cold mist that hung over the river, though the ache in his joints told him that he was getting old-twenty years older than the delectable Hilda.

The boat rode sedately along on the tide and Thorgils leaned on the steering board to make sure that her bow would nudge against the quay at exactly the right spot. He glanced to port and saw the flat marshland stretching away to the low hills in the distance. If he were to look back a little, he would almost be able to see Dawlish, the better to imagine Hilda’s warm embrace.

Ahead was the river, which rapidly narrowed to reach Exeter five miles upstream. A few yards to starboard was the village of Topsham, with its welcoming alehouses and brothels, though he had no need of the latter.

The master looked down into the well of the boat, where his crew of six were assembling along the bulwark to sing the traditional hymn of thanksgiving to the Holy Virgin for deliverance from the perils of the sea, this time joined by their solitary passenger.

This Robert Blundus was a strange fellow, mused Thorgils, as the singing reached its crescendo when the blunt prow of the Mary nudged the quay. He had arrived at the last moment, just before they sailed from St-Malo. The shipmaster had noticed that Blundus kept looking over his shoulder at the bustling throng on the quay-side and seemed relieved when a widening gap began to appear between the ship and the shore. Thorgils suspected that he was either a fugitive from the law or had unpleasant acquaintances who were hunting him down. But it was none of his business, and the coins of mixed English and French silver that Blundus offered as his passage money were genuine enough for the master to accept him aboard without any questions.

The stem-post bumped against the wharf and willing hands ashore lashed a bow-rope around one of the tree stumps buried along the quay-side. Thorgils let the incoming tide push the stern of the Mary right around in a half-circle, so that the port side came to rest against the rough stone wall, the steering board left safely out on the starboard side. As the stern ropes were thrown ashore, the passenger moved to stand impatiently at the gap in the bulwarks where the landing plank would be pushed through. His large pack was already strapped to his shoulders, and Thorgils assumed that he was a chapman, one who hawked goods such as thread, needles and ribbons, around towns and villages. It was unusual, though not unknown, for one to cross the Channel in pursuit of such trade, and the shipmaster wondered whether he had family in Brittany.

The moment the gangplank was slid ashore, the traveller hurried down it with only a perfunctory wave of farewell to the crew. The quay-side of Topsham was a short length of stone wall, with muddy banks stretching away on either side. Ships could ride upright at high tide to discharge their cargo, but the rest of the time they lay canted over on the thick mud that extended for miles down to the sea at Exmouth.

Robert Blundus had never been here before, and he surveyed the little port with some disdain, being more used to large harbours such as Southampton or King Richard’s new creation at Portsmouth. He saw a line of buildings straggling down the east bank of the river, ending in huts and sheds on the quay. A church tower in new stone rose above the centre of the long main street, and where there was a church, there was always an inn or two.

This turned his mind to the need for a meal and a bed for the night, as the short November day was coming to a close. He humped the heavy pack higher on his shoulders and set off through the cold mud of the wharf towards the high street. An icy east wind made his cheeks tingle and reminded him that he had left the warmer climes of France far behind. At least his ears were warm, as he wore a woollen cap pulled down over his forehead and neck, the pointed top flopping over to one side. His leather jerkin was bulky, belted over a pair of thick serge breeches, cross-gartered above wooden-soled clogs. As he strode purposefully towards the village, a dew-drop formed on the end of his fleshy nose and his rather prominent blue eyes watered as they scanned the motley collection of buildings. Some were stone, but the majority were either wood or cob, a mixture of mud and straw plastered over a wooden frame, with roofs of reeded thatch.

The narrow street was busy, especially with porters lugging large bales of wool or pushing handcarts laden with goods from the quay-side. The usual throng of loungers and tradesmen mixed with wives and grandmothers around the striped canvas booths that lined the edges of the muddy street. Beggars and cripples hunched against walls, and at the gate of the churchyard a leper swung his rattle and hopefully held out his bowl for alms. Some more permanent shops were open behind the flimsy stalls, their shutters hinged down to form counters displaying their goods.

But Robert Blundus was not looking to buy anything except a night’s lodging, and his gaze was turned upward to seek the icons of the local inns. Given that only one person in a hundred could read, the taverns advertised themselves by signs hung over their doors. Looking along the street, he picked out several familiar devices-there was a Bush, an Anchor and a Crown. He chose the latter as looking slightly less dilapidated than the others and, ducking his head under the low lintel, went inside.

The large room that took up the whole of the ground floor was lit only by the flames from a large fire burning in a pit in the centre, a ring of large stones embedded in baked clay separating it from the rushes strewn over the floor. A bench ran all around the walls and a few stools and more benches were scattered around the hearth. The room was filled with men, though in one corner he heard raucous laughter coming from a pair of whores who were cavorting with some travellers. The air was thick with wood-smoke, sweat and spilt ale, the normal atmosphere of a busy tavern.

Blundus made his way towards the back of the taproom, ignoring the blasphemous abuse of a young serving-maid who bumped into him with a tray of ale-pots. He found the innkeeper, a surly man with a face badly scarred by old cow-pox, and negotiated for accommodation and food. For a penny, he was promised supper, two quarts of ale and clean straw in the loft. The landlord pointed to a wide ladder in the corner and Blundus shrugged off his pack and manhandled it up the steps. Here he found a dozen hessian bags stuffed with bracken or straw, laid out in rows under the rafters of the thatched roof. He chose one nearest to a dim tallow-dip that flickered on a shelf and dumped his backpack alongside it. The loft was deserted at that time of day, but the pedlar was wary enough to remove a small package wrapped in kid leather and put it for safe-keeping in the scrip on his belt.

Downstairs, he was served his promised meal on a rough table under the ladder, alongside a row of casks of ale and cider. An earthenware bowl of mutton stew was banged down in front of him by the foul-mouthed serving-maid, together with a thick trencher of stale bread on which was a slab of fat boiled pork. A spoon crudely carved from a cow’s horn was supplied for the stew, but he used his own dagger to attack the pig meat. A half-loaf of rye bread and a lump of hard cheese followed, and he considered that the food was adequate in quantity, if not quality-though after days of shipboard tack, he was in no mood to complain. After two large pots of passable ale, he felt ready to sleep, as it was now dark outside.

Climbing back up the ladder, Blundus felt both his advancing age-he was almost fifty-and the effects of three days rolling across the Channel on a small boat, so he was glad to flop down on to his bag of straw. He opened his pack again to pull out a woollen cloak to serve as a blanket, then could not resist another look at his most prized acquisition. In the dim light, he groped in his belt pouch and unwrapped the soft leather bundle, revealing a small wooden box, small enough to lie across his hand, intricately carved and partly covered in gold leaf, though much had worn off to reveal the dark rosewood underneath. Blundus opened the hinged lid and looked again at the glass vial that lay inside. He took it out, pulled off the gilded stopper and tipped the contents into his palm. Though he had examined it several times before, the thing still intrigued him-a grey stick-like object, a few inches long, composed of dried wood, as hard as stone. The surface was dark brown in places, which he assumed was the alleged staining with the blood, though Blundus neither believed nor cared whether it had genuinely come from the cross of Jesus Christ. As a connoisseur of relics, however, he knew that it must have considerable value, given its unusual authentication.

Cynically, but realistically, he knew that if all the alleged fragments of the True Cross revered in abbeys, priories and cathedrals across Europe were assembled together, they would not reconstitute a cross, but a small forest! Similarly, most of the bone fragments of the saints and martyrs owed their origin to sheep, swine and even fowls. Still, no religious establishment that wished to attract the lucrative pilgrim trade could afford to be without a relic or two-and the more extravagant the claims of origin, the more valuable they were.

Robert Blundus slipped the relic back into its tube and replaced the wooden plug. Though ostensibly he was a common chapman, this was a cover for his real trade, as a dealer in religious relics. He travelled the roads of England in his search and often went to France, Spain and even Italy to seek sanctified artefacts. He prided himself on dealing in a better class of relics than the many pedlars who hawked homemade or obviously spurious objects about the countryside, and he had built up a reputation for procuring good material. This particular relic was such a prize addition to his stock because it had a certificate of provenance. He felt in the little box and took out a folded strip of parchment, bearing a short sentence in Latin. He could not read it, but for a silver coin a clerk in Fontrevault Abbey had translated it for him. This is a fragment of the True Cross, stained with the blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which was preserved for safe-keeping in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. It was signed by Geoffrey Mappestone, Knight-and, most important of all, bore a small wax seal carrying an impression from his signet ring over the date, July 1100.

Blundus grinned to himself as he carefully put away the vial and parchment and wrapped up the wooden box. Thankfully, the Crusader’s certificate of authentication made no mention of Barzak’s curse, which might well have reduced the value of the relic to almost nothing.

As he lay back on his pallet, trying to ignore the influx of strange fleas that entered his clothing to breed with his own French mites, he sleepily went over in his mind what the abbey clerk had told him. The man was a priest in lower orders, employed in the chancery of Fontrevault, the famous abbey in Anjou, and was thus well acquainted with the gossip and legends of that place. Sweetened by his translation fee and several cups of red wine, he told Blundus that the relic had been brought to the abbey over ninety years earlier, in the first years of the century. It had been sold to the then abbot by one Julius, who had travelled from Marseilles, where he had landed by ship from the Holy Land.

He was paid for it in gold, on the basis of Sir Geoffrey’s authentication, but that evening, on his way to the nearby Loire to take a boat down to the coast, Julius had been struck by lightning in a sudden violent thunderstorm that had appeared from a clear blue sky. The clerk was happy to relate the gruesome fact that when the blackened corpse was found, the gold had been fused into a molten mass which had burned into Julius’s belly!

The abbot had had a special gilded box made for the relic, which was placed in an ornate casket upon the altar of the Chapel of the Holy Rood, off the main nave of the great abbey. Though originally vaunted as a most important acquisition, it soon fell out of favour, as pilgrims and cripples who came to pray and supplicate before it either gained no benefit or actually became worse. Within a few years, the relic was shunned and ignored, especially after ominous rumours began circulating about the curse, brought back by knights and soldiers returning from the First Crusade, especially some of the newly formed Templars. The chancery clerk had told Blundus that the present abbot had plans to remodel the chapel and either consign the relic to a remote corner of the crypt or even send it to Rome for others to deal with the unwelcome object as they saw fit.

Robert Blundus had been making his way back through Aquitaine and Anjou to reach the Channel ports to return home after his autumn forage for relics as far south as Santiago de Compostela in Spain. He had called at Fontrevault on the off-chance of picking up a final bargain, perhaps from one of the other relic hawkers trying their luck at selling to the famous abbey. He followed his usual practice of seeking out and bribing some servant of the religious house who knew all the local gossip, and this time struck lucky with the abbey clerk. On the basis of what he learnt from him, Blundus hired a thug from a low tavern to steal the fragment, the side chapel being virtually deserted at certain times of the day. The thief easily levered open the reliquary with his dagger and removed the gilded box. It could well be days or even weeks before anyone noticed that the shunned relic had vanished-and according to the clerk, the abbey authorities might well be relieved at its disappearance.

Without opening the box, the incurious thief had promptly handed it over to collect his reward, and by nightfall Blundus was well on his way north astride his pony. He kept a wary eye open for pursuit, in case the ruffian had given him away, but he reached St-Malo without incident and here sold his steed and took ship for England.

Now he settled back on his bag of straw and contentedly looked forward to going home to his house and his wife in Salisbury. Once he had sold the relics he had acquired, he could live in comfort on the proceeds throughout the winter, until the spring sent him off again on his travels.

Blundus set out soon after dawn, buying a couple of mutton pastries and a small loaf at a stall in Topsham High Street. He ate as he trudged along, well used to long journeys on foot-he felt it was not worth haggling for another pony on this side of the Channel. He was aiming for Glastonbury in the next county of Somerset, before turning eastward for home, but there was no great hurry. He reckoned on covering at least fifteen miles before each nightfall, even during the shorter days of late autumn.

He had enquired of the best route at the inn and the tactiturn landlord had directed him as far as Honiton, beyond which the man had no idea of the roads. The chapman was told that the village of Clyst St Mary was his first landmark, and within an hour he had passed through the small hamlet, the manor of which belonged to the Bishop of Exeter.

There was the usual straggle of people on the rough track beyond the village, a man herding goats to market, an old woman with a pig on a rope and a number of pilgrims in their wide-brimmed hats, on their way back from Canterbury. An ox-cart rumbled past him, filled with turnips, then the road was empty as it curved through a dense wood of tall trees, their browned leaves fluttering to the ground in the east wind. It was hardly a forest, as just around the bend behind him the strip fields of Clyst St Mary ran up the slopes on either side of the road, but it was a substantial wood, a westerly extension of the forest that stretched eastward for miles towards Ottery St Mary and Sidmouth.

Robert Blundus was not a nervous man and he was used to tramping alone along the tracks of several countries. He had no sword, but carried a stout staff which was mainly for support. He reasoned that a common chapman was hardly worth the attention of highway robbers, though when he could, he tried to travel in the company of others for safety.

Today there was no one going the same way on this part of the road and he stepped out along the empty avenue of trees with no particular apprehension, thinking more of the pitch he was going to make to the Abbot of Glastonbury, to get the best price for his notable relic. It was therefore all the more of a shock when suddenly he heard a rustle in the undergrowth at the side of the track, and before he could turn he was grabbed from behind and violently thrust to the ground. He had a quick glimpse of two ragged figures tearing at the straps of his pack, before he managed to swing his staff and strike one of them on the shoulder. With a bellow of pain, the ruffian raised a club made from a twisted branch and struck Blundus on the head. Cursing, he repeated the blows, and when the pedlar had fallen senseless, gave him some heavy kicks in the ribs and belly for good measure. Pulling the large pack free and rifling the pouch on his belt, the two footpads made off into the trees, leaving the injured man unconscious on the verge.

Perhaps somewhere in Heaven-or maybe Hell-the spirit of Barzak the Mohammedan was content that his curse was still as potent as ever.

High up in the narrow gatehouse tower of Exeter’s Rougemont castle, the county coroner was sitting in his cramped and draughty chamber, painfully mouthing the Latin words that his bony forefinger was slowly tracing out on a sheet of parchment. Sir John de Wolfe was learning to read, and at the age of forty was finding it a tedious process. His clerk, former priest Thomas de Peyne, sat at the end of the rough trestle table that, with two stools, was the only furniture in the room that the sheriff had grudgingly allotted them. Thomas watched covertly as his master laboriously mispronounced the words, wishing that he could help him, in place of the stupid vicar who was ineptly teaching the coroner. The clerk, once a tutor in the cathedral school of Winchester, was a fluent reader and a gifted calligrapher-it pained him to see the slow progress that Sir John was making, but he knew the coroner’s pride prevented him from asking for help.

On a window sill opposite the table sat a giant of a man, staring out through the unglazed slit through which moaned a cold wind. He had wild red hair like a storm-tossed hayrick, and a huge drooping moustache of the same ruddy tint. Gwyn, a Cornishman from Polruan, had been de Wolfe’s squire and companion for almost twenty years, in campaigns stretching from Ireland to the Holy Land. When the Crusader had finally sheathed his sword a couple of years ago, Gwyn had remained as his bodyguard and coroner’s officer. He lowered the hunk of bread and cheese that he was chewing and focused his bright blue eyes on the road that came up from the High Street to the gatehouse drawbridge below.

‘There’s a fellow riding up Castle Street as if the Devil himself is on his heels,’ he announced, speaking in the Cornish Celtic that he used with the coroner, who had a Welsh mother from whose knee he had learned a similar language.

‘Why can’t you speak in a civilized fashion, not that barbaric lingo!’ whined the clerk in English. He was a runt of a fellow, his excellent brain betrayed by a poor body. He was small, had a humped shoulder, a lame leg and his thin, pinched face had a long pointed nose and a receding chin. The fact that he had been unfrocked as a priest over an alleged indecent assault on a girl pupil in Winchester made him not the most eligible of men. Gwyn ignored him and, wiping the breadcrumbs from his moustache with the back of his hand, addressed himself again to John de Wolfe.

‘I know that man, he’s the manor-reeve from Clyst St Mary. I’ll wager he’s coming up here.’

The coroner pushed his parchment aside in disgust, glad for some excuse to give up his lesson.

‘We’ve had nothing from that area for weeks,’ he growled. As the first coroner for Devon, appointed less than three months earlier, he was responsible for looking into sudden deaths, murders, accidents, serious assaults, rapes, fires, treasure trove, catches of royal fish and a host of other legal situations. This was mostly with the object of drumming up revenue for King Richard, to help pay for his costly wars in France, as well as paying off the massive ransom owing to Henry of Germany, after Richard’s capture on the way home from the Crusades.

Gwyn was soon proved correct, as there was a clatter of feet on the narrow stairway that curled up from the guardroom below. The sacking that hung over the doorway as a feeble draught excluder was pushed aside to admit two men. The first was a man-at-arms in a thick leather jerkin and a round iron helmet, the other a thin man with a harelip, his serge riding mantle covered in road dust.

‘You’re too late, Gabriel, the ale is all gone!’ mocked Gwyn, grinning at his friend, the sergeant of the castle’s men-at-arms. The grizzled old soldier touched his hand to his helmet in salute to de Wolfe, who he greatly respected as another seasoned warrior.

‘This man wants to report a violent death, Crowner. Aylmer is his name, the reeve from Clyst St Mary.’ A reeve was the overseer of a manor, who organized the work rotas for the bailiff and was a kind of village headman. This was the first time he had had dealings with this new-fangled business of coroners, and he looked at the new official with curiosity and some unease.

He saw a forbidding figure sitting behind the trestle, a man as tall as Gwyn, but not so massively built. He was dressed in a plain tunic of black, a colour that matched the abundant jet hair that curled down to his collar and the dark stubble on his long, lean face. Heavy black eyebrows overhung deep-set eyes and his big hooked nose and slightly stooped posture gave him the appearance of a great bird of prey. Aylmer had heard gossip about him and saw now why his military nickname had been ‘Black John’.

‘Well, what’s it all about, man? Don’t just stand there with your mouth hanging open,’ snapped the coroner.

The reeve was jerked into activity and quickly described how a man had been found that morning at the side of the road, with injuries from which he died in less than an hour. He had been discovered by a couple of villagers who were on their way to repair sheep pens on the other side of the woods. One had run back to Clyst to raise the hue and cry, but nothing had been found anywhere and the bailiff had sent Aylmer posthaste to Exeter to notify the coroner.

‘We have heard that we must tell you straightway of all deaths, Crowner,’ he said earnestly. ‘Not even to move the body, so we understand.’

He said this as if it were a totally incomprehensible command, but de Wolfe nodded. ‘You did the right thing, Reeve. Do you know who this man might be?’

Aylmer shook his head. ‘A total stranger, walking the high road. God knows where he was coming from or going to. Not a local, that’s for sure.’

At the moment when the reeve was telling his story, a small group of men were squatting around a dying campfire in a forest clearing, a couple of miles from Clyst St Mary. All were dishevelled, some were dressed in little better than rags, and none looked well fed-a pathetic band of outlaws, bound together only by their hatred of authority and their fear of the law officers of Devonshire. Each one of the nine had a different reason for being outcast in the forests-some had escaped from gaol, either before trial or after they had been convicted, and were waiting to go to the gallows. Gaol-breaking was common, as every prison guard was open to bribery, and often the local community was eager to save the expense of feeding them until they were hanged. Others had sought sanctuary in a church after some crime, then chosen to abjure the realm. The coroner would have taken their confessions, then sent them dressed in sack-cloth to a port to get the first ship out of the realm of England-but as soon as they were around the first bend in the road, many such abjurers would throw away the wooden cross they had to carry and melt into the trees to become outlaws. The remainder had just run away when accused of some crime, whether guilty or not. Many did not trust the rough justice meted out by the manor, shire or King’s courts-others knew they would be convicted and, as the penalty for most crimes was death, they chose the leafy refuge of the forest or the wilderness of the moors. If such suspects failed to answer to four calls at the shire court, they were declared outlaw and henceforth were ‘as the wolf’s head’-in other words, any man could legitimately slay them on sight and, as with the wolf bounty, claim five shillings if they took the outlaw’s head to the sheriff. This particular group eked out their existence by preying on travellers on the roads between Clyst St Mary and Honiton, though they also stole sheep and poultry from neighbouring villages. One or two even earned a few pence by working in the fields of certain villages, where the reeves turned a blind eye to outlaw labour when the need arose. They lived rough in the forest, sleeping in shelters of woven branches or holes dug in hillsides or river banks, stealing food from isolated crofts or buying it with money thieved from passers-by.

Today, they clustered around the two men who had assaulted and robbed the chapman on the high road, to see what they had stolen.

There was no communal spirit among these men, no sharing of booty, and, unlike the larger gangs, they had no proper leader. Each man kept what he had stolen, and those who failed to make a hit went hungry. But curiosity was a powerful thing, and they all wanted to see what Gervase of Yeovil and Simon Claver had managed to get today.

‘We had to beat the bastard quite hard,’ grunted Gervase. ‘He fought back well enough.’ As he spoke, he untied the straps on Blundus’s pack and tipped the contents on to the ground.

‘What in God’s name is this rubbish?’ snarled Simon, stirring a collection of small boxes and packets with his foot. Apart from a moderately clean spare tunic, a couple of undershirts and some hose, the packets were the only things in the pack.

‘I thought you said he was a chapman?’ sneered one of the other outlaws. ‘Where’s all his stock, then?’

‘He had twenty pence in his purse,’ countered Simon defensively, aggrieved at the critical attitude of his fellows. ‘I took that and Gervase here snatched his pack.’

‘You came off best, then,’ cackled the other man. ‘What he’s got doesn’t look worth a ha’penny!’

Gervase was looking thoughtfully at the collection of oddments on the ground, and began sorting through the packets and rolls, mostly wrapped in bits of leather or parchment. One particular object, a small wooden box wrapped in soft leather, caught his attention, and he unwrapped it and studied a small piece of parchment with interest, Simon looking over his shoulder suspiciously.

‘I might get a few pence for some of this stuff, if I can get into the city,’ he said with false nonchalance. He threw the clothing at Simon as he stuffed the other objects back into the pack.

‘Here, you can take these, you could do with some clean clothes, the way you stink!’

Simon, a tall, sinewy man of thirty, with a nose horribly eroded by some disease, looked suspiciously at his fellow-robber, afraid that he was being outwitted.

‘What’s that stuff, then? It was me that hit the pedlar the hardest, maybe I should be getting a share of it?’

To appease him, Gervase, a stockier older man, unrolled one of the packets and displayed a shrivelled piece of skin in a glass vial.

‘Some lucky charm to peddle to a gullible widow, no doubt. Probably claimed to be St Peter’s foreskin! Worth tuppence, if I’m lucky!’

Though Simon continued to look suspiciously at Gervase, the others soon lost interest in this mundane collection and, after kicking the last glowing embers of the fire into extinction, drifted away, leaving Gervase to shoulder the half-empty pack and wander off deeper into the trees, headed in the general direction of the road to Exeter.

As he walked, he again gave thanks for the fact that he was better educated than these dolts among whom cruel fate had thrown him. He had plans to escape the outlaw life as soon as he could, and this might be the opportunity he had been seeking for over a year. Gervase knew that many other outlaws had unobtrusively slipped back into normal life after an interval, usually at a place well away from their original haunts. One had even become a sheriff, until he was found out several years later.

To escape this miserable existence, it was essential for him to have money, to tide him over until he could build a new life. Until two years ago, he had been a parish priest in a hamlet near Yeovil, where he was born. He had never been a good priest, having been pushed into becoming a choirboy at Exeter Cathedral, after his shoemaker father died and his mother could no longer support five children. At eighteen, he progressed to becoming a ‘secondary’, an apprentice priest in the household of one of the cathedral canons. In due course, at the requisite age of twenty-four, he was ordained as a priest, and served the canon as one of his vicars, attending most of the endless services each day while his master stayed at home taking his ease. Dissatisfied and disgruntled, he eventually obtained a living at a parish near his home town and, though it was a poor one, at least there he was his own master. A fondness for wine and occasional trips to a brothel in Exeter, however, made him discontented with his miserable stipend, and he was driven by debt to sell a chalice and plate from his own church, claiming that they had been stolen. He was soon exposed and the bishop’s Consistory Court expelled him both from his parish and from the priesthood. It was only by claiming ‘benefit of clergy’ that he avoided the Shire Court, which would surely have hanged him, as all thefts of objects worth more than a shilling were felonies and inevitably carried the death sentence.

Thrown out of his living, Gervase turned to petty crime to survive and, following thefts from various villages, he was soon was on the run from the ‘hue and cry’. The only place left was the forest, and for the past year or so he had been living rough with this handful of crude companions. He was careful not to let them know that he had been a priest; his tonsure had grown over before he became outlaw and he never revealed that he could read and write, a legacy from his days in the cathedral school that he had attended as a choirboy. Gervase was not quite sure why he had hidden his background, except to avoid possible ridicule from their jealous tongues, but now he was glad, as they would not realize that he recognized that at least one of the relics in Blundus’s pack was of some value.

The band of outlaws usually split up each day, going about their own nefarious business, but meeting either that evening or the next at some pre-arranged rendezvous in the woods. This time, the former priest hoped that, with luck, he would never see them again, if the plan that was fermenting in his mind was successful.

Early that afternoon, Gervase was resting up in a thicket just inside the edge of the forest, a few hundred paces from the Exeter road. The next part of his plan required the cover of darkness, so he was dozing under a ragged blanket that he usually wore wrapped around his shoulders, trying not to shiver in the late autumn chill.

He was unaware of someone passing on the muddy track who had much in common with him-another unfrocked priest. Thomas de Peyne was jogging by on his pony, sitting side-saddle like a woman. He was following the rest of the coroner’s team and the reeve from Clyst St Mary as they rode to inspect the body of Gervase’s victim. A mile farther on, they saw a small group of men standing at the edge of the track, under a canopy of red-and brown-leafed trees.

‘They are my men, guarding the corpse,’ announced the reeve, and when they dismounted and approached the sentinels, they saw a still figure sprawled face down in the grass and weeds. Gwyn and the coroner squatted alongside it and de Wolfe tested the stiffness in the arms and legs. ‘Been dead at least a few hours,’ he grunted, then ran his fingers over the back of the cadaver’s head, where he felt dried blood in the hair and a pulpy swelling covering half the top of the head

‘Not much doubt how he died,’ said Gwyn, with grim satisfaction, as he laid his own fingers on the scalp. ‘He’s had a good hammering on his head-come and have a feel, Thomas!’ The big Cornishman could never resist teasing the clerk, as he knew how squeamish Thomas was about such matters.

John de Wolfe looked down at the body, taking in the sober but good-quality serge breeches and leather jerkin, with a stout pair of clogs on the feet.

‘Not a yeoman nor a journeyman,’ he mused. ‘Neither does he look like a pilgrim or well-to-do merchant.’

‘He’d do for a chapman, I reckon,’ said the reeve. ‘Though he’s got no pack.’

Gwyn heaved the body over on to its back. ‘He still has a scrip on his belt,’ he grunted, opening the flap of the purse attached to the dead man’s belt. ‘Empty! Whatever was in it has gone the same way as his pack.’

Though not mistrusting his officer, John felt obliged to look for himself, and he frowned as his finger picked up some glinting specks as he poked into the corners of the pouch.

‘Strange! Looks like shards of gold leaf.’

‘Maybe he was a goldsmith?’ hazarded Gwyn. ‘Though they rarely travel alone, given the value of their wares.’

One of the villagers, who stood forming a silent audience, spoke up.

‘Plenty of bloody outlaws in these woods. Damned menace they are, stealing from us all the time. I lost three chickens last week-and it weren’t no fox, neither.’

‘They don’t usually kill, though,’ admitted the reeve.

‘He was just unlucky, this fellow,’ said the coroner. ‘They must have hit him harder than they intended.’

Even with the body face up, no one recognized the man. His face was discoloured from the death staining that had run downward into his skin, except where the nose and chin remained pale from being pressed into the ground.

‘Stranger, he is!’ remarked another bystander. ‘Not from round here.’

Between them, Gwyn and the reeve pulled off the jerkin, undershirt and breeches and examined the rest of the body.

‘Some nasty scratches on his chest and loins-and big fresh bruises as well,’ observed the coroner’s officer, pointing to some pink-red discolorations on the victim’s trunk. He felt a couple of broken ribs crackling under the pressure of his big fingers.

‘Been kicked, no doubt,’ grunted de Wolfe, an expert on all manner of injuries after two decades of fighting in Ireland, France and the Holy Land. He looked up at the reeve.

‘You said he was still alive when he was found?’

One of the villagers, an older man with grey bristly hair, answered.

‘Only just, Crowner! I found him and he lasted no more than half an hour after that before he passed away, God rest his soul.’

‘He said nothing about who attacked him?’

The man shook his head. ‘Anyway, he wouldn’t recognize some bloody forest thieves, especially as he’s a stranger. All he got out with his last gasps was “Glastonbury”-and then something about some curse.’

De Wolfe glared at the villager. ‘What sort of curse? Was he just cursing those who attacked him?’

‘No, there was some name he called it…what was it, now?’ The elderly villein scratched the grey stubble on his face as an aid to memory. ‘Yes, strange name it was, stuck in my memory…Barzak, that was it!’

It was dusk by the time John de Wolfe got back to his house in Martin’s Lane, a narrow alley that joined Exeter’s High Street to the cathedral Close. It was a tall, narrow building of timber, one of only three in the lane, facing a livery stable where he kept Odin, his old warhorse. He was in good time for the evening meal and so avoided a sour face from his wife Matilda, who was forever complaining about the irregular hours that resulted from him being the county coroner-though it was she who had pushed him into the post several months before, seeing it as a way to claw her way farther up the social ladder of the county hierarchy. Her brother, Sir Richard de Revelle, was the sheriff of Devon, and to have a husband who was the second-most senior law officer was another feather in her snobbish cap.

Matilda was a short, heavily built woman, four years older than her husband. They had been pushed into marriage by their parents sixteen years earlier, and both had regretted it ever since. Until he gave up warfare two years previously, John had managed to stay away from his wife for all but a few months of those sixteen years, at endless campaigns in Ireland, France and in the Holy Land at the Third Crusade.

Their meals were usually silent affairs, as each sat at the far ends of the long table in the hall, the only room apart from Matilda’s solar built onto the back of the house, reached by wooden stairs from the yard behind. Tonight, John made an effort at conversation, telling Matilda of the unknown victim of outlaws at Clyst St Mary. She showed little interest, as usual, and he thought sullenly that if the dead man had been a canon or a bishop she would have been all ears, having a morbid fascination with anything to do with the Church. She spent much of her time at her devotions, either in the huge cathedral a few yards away or at her favourite little parish church, St Olave’s in Fore Street, where he suspected that she had a crush on the fat priest.

He pressed on doggedly with his tale, telling how he had held an inquest in the tithe barn of the village, getting Gwyn to gather as many of the male inhabitants over twelve years of age as a jury. They had to inspect the body and the First Finder, the old man, had to relate how the corpse was discovered. As he was a stranger, it was impossible for the village to ‘make presentment of Englishry’, to prove that he was a Saxon and not a Norman, though as well over a century had passed since the Conquest, this was becoming more and more meaningless as the races intermarried. It was another ploy for the King’s Council to screw more money from the populace, however, as without such proof the ‘murdrum’ fine would be imposed on the village, as a redundant penalty for Saxons assassinating their invaders.

There was little else the inquest could achieve, he concluded to the inattentive Matilda. The only possible verdict was ‘murder by persons unknown’, and there seemed little chance of ever finding the outlaws in those dense woods that threaded through cultivated land all over the county.

When they had finished their meal, boiled salmon with onions and cabbage served on trenchers of thick stale bread, their maid Mary came in to clear up and bring a jug of Loire wine, which they drank seated on either side of the blazing log fire in the hearth. John had made one concession to comfort in the high, bare hall by having a stone fireplace built against the back wall, with a new-fangled chimney going up through the roof, instead of the usual fire-pit in the centre of the floor, which filled the room with eye-watering smoke.

They sat in silence again while they finished their wine, then his wife predictably announced that she was retiring to her solar to have her French maid Lucille prepare her for bed. John sat for a while with another cup of wine, fondling the ears of his old hound Brutus, who had crept in from the back yard to lie before the fire. Some time later, the dog rose to his haunches and looked expectantly at his master, part of a familiar routine.

‘Come on, then, time for our walk.’ With Brutus as an excuse that fooled no one, least of all Matilda, John took his wolfskin cloak from a hook in the vestibule and stepped out into the gloom, heading across the close for the lower town. Here, in Idle Lane, was the Bush Inn-and its landlady, his Welsh mistress, the delectable Nesta.

At about the same time that the coroner was loping through the ill-lit streets of Exeter, the outlaw Gervase was committing yet another felony in the village of Wonford, just outside the city. By the light of a half-moon, seen fitfully through gaps in the cloud, he crept up to the village church. It was deserted in the evening, as the parish priest had no service until the early morning mass the following day. When Gervase trod quietly up to the church door, he knew from his own experience that the parson would be either sleeping or drinking after his supper in the small cottage at the far end of the churchyard. Gently opening the door, he made his way in almost pitch darkness to the back of the building, below the stubby tower that had been added when the old wooden church from Saxon times had been reconstructed in stone twenty years earlier.

Here he groped about and was rewarded by the feel of a coarse curtain which hung over an alcove, a space for a birch broom and a couple of leather buckets as well as ecclesiastical oddments, such as lamp oil, candles and spare vestments. Gervase pulled the curtain aside and felt around the walls inside until his fingers found some garments hanging from a wooden peg. Taking them down, he went back to the door and waited for the moon to appear again, so that he could see what they were. With a grunt of satisfaction, he found that he had a broad-brimmed pilgrim’s hat and an old cassock, a long black tunic that reached to the ankles, as well as a thin white super-pelisse, usually called a ‘surplice’. This last was of no use to him and he took it back to its peg, then made off into the night with his spoils.

After sleeping under a bush just within the forest’s edge, he rose late and ate the remnants of the food he had saved from the gang’s last meal. In the daylight, he saw that the cassock was patched and threadbare, but still serviceable. His next task was to take his small knife and, after honing it well on a piece of stone, use it not only to rasp three weeks’ growth of stubble from his face, but also from the crown of his head, roughly restoring the tonsure that he used to have before he was ejected from holy orders. It was a difficult task to perform on himself, but with patience and determination he made a fair job of transforming himself back into a priest, especially after he had stuffed his own meagre clothing into his pack, put on the stolen cassock and jammed the battered hat on his head.

Around what he judged to be noon, he went back to the road and with his ash staff in his hand, set off boldly towards Exeter. He decided that it was highly unlikely that he would be recognized by someone from his past life in distant Yeovil, especially as the drooping brim of the pilgrim’s hat helped to obscure his face. There were a few others on the track, going both to and from the city, but the main traffic of people going into Exeter with produce to sell had long since dwindled, most entering the city as soon as the gates opened at dawn. To those whom he passed he gave a greeting and sometimes raised his hand in a blessing. After a while he began to feel as if he really was a priest again, and he became more confident as he approached the South Gate. He slowed his pace so that he entered together with a group of country folk driving a couple of pigs and carrying live ducks and chickens hanging by their feet from poles over their shoulders. The porter on the gate was too interested in munching on a meat pie to give him even a cursory glance, and soon Gervase was striding up Southgate Street, past the Serge Market and the bloodstained cobbles of the Shambles, to reach Carfoix, the central crossing of the four main roads. He had been to Exeter a few times, some years ago, but now had to ask directions from a runny-nosed urchin.

‘Where’s St Nicholas Priory, lad?’

The boy decided that this cleric was too tough looking to risk some cheeky reply and pointed out the way. ‘Not far down there, Father. A rough part of town, that is.’

Gervase entered some narrow lanes and found himself in a mean part of the city known as Bretayne, filled with densely packed houses, huts and shacks, the filthy alleys running with sewage, in which urchins, goats, dogs and rats seemed to survive in squalid harmony. After a few turns and twists, he saw a small stone building, enclosed by a wall that marked off a vegetable plot and a few fruit trees.

There was no porter on the gate and he went along a stony path that led around to the entrance. Near by, a barefoot monk was hoeing weeds between rows of onions, a dark Benedictine habit hoisted up between his bare thighs and tucked into his belt. He straightened up and stared curiously at the visitor, who held up his hand in a blessing and dredged some appropriate Latin greeting from his memory.

‘I wish to speak with the prior,’ he said, reverting to common English.

‘Ring the bell at the door, Brother,’ replied the gardener, pointing at an archway.

He did so. A young novitiate appeared and, after enquiring about his business, led him along a short, gloomy passage and knocked at the door of the prior’s parlour.

Inside, Gervase found the head of the establishment seated behind a small table, some parchments before him and another pale young brother seated at his side, wielding a quill pen. Prior Vincent was a small man with an almost spherical head. He had no tonsure, for he was completely bald, and his face was moon shaped to match. Given his small eyes and prim, pursed mouth, Gervase felt that he was not the ideal customer for a sacred relic, but he had little choice in the matter.

With the novitiate lurking behind him, the other two monks stared enquiringly at this rather shabby priest who stood before them.

‘What can we do for you, Brother? Are you seeking bed and board on your travels?’ asked the prior, in a high, quavering voice.

The renegade priest falsely explained that he was from a parish in North Somerset, on his way home from a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and recently landed from a ship at Plymouth. Gervase followed his habit of sticking as close to the truth as possible, as he had once been a pilgrim to Santiago many years before and could fabricate a convincing story about it if challenged. He chose Somerset for his parish as this was in a different diocese from Exeter and it would be less likely that anyone here would be familiar with any of the incumbents from that area.

‘I would be grateful for a little food and drink, but I have no wish to impose upon you for a night’s lodging,’ he said piously.

The prior nodded, relieved that they were spared the trouble and expense of putting up an unexpected guest. ‘Young Francis here will see that you get something in the kitchen, before you go on your way.’

He said this with an air of finality and picked up a parchment roll again, but Gervase had not finished. ‘There is one thing more which may interest you, Prior. I will admit that after six months’ journeying, I am destitute, my last coins being spent on the passage from St-Malo to Plymouth.’

The prior suppressed a groan, thinking that here was another impoverished priest looking for a handout, but his suspicions were dispelled by Gervase’s next words.

‘I came across a remarkable item on my travels which I felt might interest some religious house in England. I intended taking it to Wells or perhaps Winchester, but as I find myself in Exeter with virtually no funds to continue my journey, I thought to offer it here first.’

Prior Vincent was intrigued, but he was not altogether satisfied with this scruffy clerk who had wandered in from the street.

‘Why, then, did you not go first to the cathedral?’

The outlaw had anticipated this question-he had deliberately avoided the cathedral, where the far larger complement of priests increased the risk of his being recognized.

‘I had heard of St Nicholas Priory and knew it to be a daughter of Battle Abbey, whose fame is known far and wide. It occurred to me that you might relish the opportunity to secure the object to present to your abbot, gaining his gratitude and respect.’

The flattery was not lost on the prior, who could also benefit from some extra goodwill from his superior at Battle, the abbey near Hastings erected by William the Bastard to commemorate the great victory of the Normans that gave them England.

‘What is this remarkable object?’ he snapped. ‘Not yet another piece of the True Cross, I hope?’ he added sarcastically.

Gervase managed not to look discomfited as he admitted that, indeed, it was. ‘But with a great difference, Prior, from the usual dross that unscrupulous relic merchants hawk around. This has undoubted authentication.’

He bent to open his satchel and took out the faded gilt box, removing it from its leather wrapping and handing it to the bald monk.

‘Pray read the message on the parchment in the box-and be sure to study the seal upon it,’ he recommended.

There was a silence as the curious prior, with his even more inquisitive clerk craning his head over his master’s shoulder, looked at the glass tube and read the letter from Sir Geoffrey Mappeston.

‘I have heard of that knight,’ volunteered the clerk. ‘He was a famous Crusader earlier this century!’

‘So have I, boy,’ retorted Anselm testily, fingering the seal attached to the parchment. ‘It certainly seems a genuine note. Whether or not the relic is authentic is another matter.’ He jerked his round face up towards the visitor. ‘How did you come by this?’ he demanded. ‘Did you steal it from some cathedral in France or Spain?’

‘Indeed I did not!’ exclaimed Gervase indignantly. ‘I bought it at considerable expense from a relic dealer near Chartres, whom I succoured when he was in distress.’ He spun an inventive yarn about helping a man whose horse had bolted, leaving him on a lonely road with a broken leg. In return, the dealer had let him have the relic at a reduced, but still substantial, price, which accounted for Gervase’s present poverty.

‘For the good of my soul, I would sell it for no more than I gave for it, at no profit,’ he said piously. ‘Such a relic would be a valuable acquisition for any religious house and repay its cost a thousandfold from the offerings of the pilgrims that it would attract. One only has to look to Glastonbury Abbey to see what riches they have amassed since they discovered the bones of King Arthur and his queen there!’

He said this with a sly grin, in which the other men joined with conspiratorial smirks of disbelief at the enterprise of their Somerset brothers. Prior Vincent turned over the ancient tube thoughtfully and stared at the contents with a mixture of reverence and scepticism. Then he reread the faded words on the parchment and studied the seal more closely.

‘How much do you want for this?’ he asked eventually, peering pugnaciously at the man opposite.

‘What I paid for it, the equivalent of thirty marks,’ lied Gervase.

The prior put the vial on his table as if it had suddenly become red hot.

‘Twenty pounds! Impossible, that’s more than a year’s income for this little place. You should be willing to donate such a sacred object to us for the good of your mortal soul, not trying to extort such a huge sum from your own brothers!’

Gervase was in no mood to start bargaining with the very first customer he came across.

‘Would that I could afford to, Prior-but I sold all I had to fund my pilgrimage and now have nothing in the world. My living in Somerset has been given to another in my absence and I am not sure of finding a new stipend on my return. I have to recover this money in order to live!’

The rotund priest opposite was not impressed by this plea. He pushed the box, tube and parchment back across the desk towards Gervase.

‘Then you had better give this to your bishop as a bribe for a new living-I certainly can’t afford a third of that price, much as I would like to present it to my own abbot.’

As the outlaw retrieved his property, he concealed his disappointment philosophically, consoling himself with the knowledge that this was the first attempt at a sale and there were several other opportunities.

As he left the room, the prior seemed sorry enough for this penurious priest to repeat his offer of hospitality, and Gervase was taken by the young probationer for a plain but hearty meal in the small refectory. Here he tucked into a bowl of mutton stew, followed by a thick trencher of stale bread bearing a slab of fat bacon and two fried eggs, all washed down with a quart of common ale. After foraging and often going hungry in the forest, this was the first decent meal he had enjoyed in a couple of years, and he uttered not a word until he had finished. Then he spoke to the young lad, who had watched in awe as Gervase wolfed down the food.

‘What other religious houses are there in these parts?’ he asked.

The novitiate shrugged. ‘Apart from the cathedral, nothing that is likely to afford such an expensive relic. There’s Polsloe Priory just north of the city, but they have only have a handful of nuns. On the road to Topsham is St James’ Priory, but again there’s but a few brothers there. Your best chance would be at somewhere like Buckfast Abbey, but you must already have been there, as it’s on the road from Plymouth.’

Gervase nodded vaguely, not wanting to reveal that he had been nowhere near Plymouth or Buckfast. He knew this large abbey on the southern rim of Dartmoor by repute, and decided to try his luck there next, as it was a rich Benedictine establishment famous for its huge flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. They should easily be able to afford his price for the trophy he had for sale.

When he left St Nicholas, he walked back into the centre of Exeter and went into an alehouse on the high street. He felt suddenly weary and bemused at being among crowds of people after his years of furtive hiding in the woods. In spite of his claims of destitution, he had a purse full of pennies stolen from various places, and he sat savouring the novelty of drinking in an inn. Though it was not a common sight to see a priest in an alehouse or a brothel, it was far from unknown. Some parish priests, and even vicars and canons from the cathedral, were well known for their dissolute behaviour. Gervase was careful not to flaunt his stolen cloth and sat in a darkened corner of the large, low taproom, keeping his hat on to mark him as a pilgrim to any curious eyes. After a few quarts, he became sleepy, as the warmth and smoke from the log fire in the fire-pit in the centre of the room overcame him. When he awoke, he saw that the day was declining into dusk and, stirring himself, he enquired of the potman whether he could get a penny mattress for the night.

‘The loft is full, Father, I’m afraid. But you’ll probably get a place at the Bush in Idle Lane.’

He gave directions and, in the cold twilight, the renegade priest made his way down to the lower part of town and negotiated for a night’s lodging with the landlady of the inn there. After a couple of years of enforced celibacy, he eyed the attractive red-haired Welshwoman with covert lust, but her brisk, businesslike manner discouraged him from any lascivious overtures. He spent the rest of the evening drinking and having another good meal of boiled pork knuckle with onions, before taking himself up the ladder to the large loft. For the first time for several years, he luxuriated on a soft pile of sweet-smelling hay enclosed in a hessian bag, with a woollen blanket to cover him. Unlike in the other inn, there were few other lodgers and, oblivious to the snores of two other drunken patrons in the corner, he soon slipped into a deep sleep, from which he was never to awaken.

A couple of hours after dawn the next day, Lucy, one of the two serving maids at the Bush, climbed up the wide ladder at the back of the taproom, clutching a leather bucket of water and a birch broom. Her morning task was to clean up the loft after the overnight lodgers had left-all too often, those who had drunk too much had thrown up their ale over the floor or their pallets.

This morning, however, it was a different-coloured fluid that required scouring from the bare boards. As soon as Lucy reached the top of the ladder and started to move among the dozen rough mattresses laid out on the floor, she gave a piercing shriek that brought the landlady Nesta and her old potman Edwin running to the foot of the ladder, together with one or two patrons who had been eating an early breakfast.

‘That priest that came last night!’ wailed Lucy from the top. ‘He’s had his throat cut!’

Edwin, a veteran of the Irish wars in which he lost one eye and half a foot, stumbled up the ladder to confirm the maid’s claim, and a moment later he reappeared beside Lucy.

‘She’s right enough, mistress! I’d better go for the crowner straight away!’

Within half an hour, Sir John de Wolfe and his officer and clerk had arrived on the scene, any problem at the Bush being a great spur to their keenness to attend. Before climbing the ladder, John slipped an arm around Nesta’s slim waist and looked down anxiously at her. At twenty-eight, she was still attractive, with a trim figure and a heart-shaped face crowned with a mass of chestnut hair.

‘Are you very upset, my love?’ he murmured in the Welsh that they used together.

His mistress was made of sufficiently stern stuff not to be shocked by a dead body.

‘I’m upset for the reputation of my inn!’ she replied pertly. ‘It’s not good for business to have customers murdered in my beds.’

She had experienced an occasional death in the tavern, always the result of some drunken brawl, but to find a guest lying on his pallet with his throat cut was an unwelcome novelty.

‘Let’s see what this is about, Gwyn,’ snapped the coroner, leading the way up the ladder, at the top of which Edwin awaited them. With Gwyn close behind and Thomas de Peyne a reluctant third, he trooped across the wide floor of the loft. Apart from one remaining lodger, who had drunk so much the previous night that he was still snoring in a far corner, the high, dusty loft was empty. Two rows of crude mattresses lay on the bare boards, the farthest one in the second line occupied by the corpse. The place was poorly lit, as there was no window opening in the great expanse of thatch above them, but a little light filtered up from the eaves and through the wide opening where the ladder entered. Edwin had had the forethought to light a horn lantern, and by its feeble light de Wolfe bent to examine the dead man.

A great gash extended from under his left ear across to the right side of his neck below the jaw, exposing muscles and gristle. A welter of dark blood soaked his ragged shirt and the blanket, running down into the straw of the palliasse, and there was a patch of dried pink froth over the centre of his neck.

‘A single cut, right through his windpipe,’ observed Gwyn, with the satisfied air of a connoisseur of fatal injuries. ‘No trial cuts either-so he didn’t do it himself.’

‘Hardly likely to be a suicide, if there’s no knife here!’ sneered Thomas sarcastically, always keen to embarrass his Cornish colleague. He pointed to the crown of the dead man’s head, where bristly tufts of hair remained on the bared scalp, together with some small scratches. ‘That’s a strange-looking tonsure, master. Freshly made with a very poor knife.’

John had to agree with him, but saw no particular significance in it.

‘Let’s have a look at the rest of him, then.’

They went through their familiar routine of pulling up the rest of the clothing and examining the chest, belly and limbs, but apart from the massive throat wound there was nothing to find.

‘His clothing is poor, even for a priest,’ grunted Gwyn. ‘The shirt is little better than a rag and his shoes are worn through.’

‘The cassock is a disgrace, too!’ complained Thomas. ‘I wonder if he really is a priest?’

The coroner looked up at Edwin. ‘How many were sleeping here last night?’

‘We only had three besides him,’ quavered the old man. ‘Apart from that drunken sot in the corner.’

De Wolfe loped across the loft and shook the man awake, but could get no sense out of him, as he was still totally befuddled.

‘Who were the other three?’ he demanded, frustrated at the lack of witnesses. Edwin shrugged and Nesta answered from where she stood on the ladder, halfway into the loft.

‘They were travellers, who went on their way soon after dawn. They took pallets in the first row just here, so can’t have noticed this man lying dead over there in the darkness.’

‘Somebody must have come up here to kill him, so maybe it was them,’ reasoned Gwyn.

Nesta shrugged her shapely shoulders. ‘We were even busier than usual late last night. People come and go all the time. I can’t watch every move they make.’

‘He doesn’t look as if he had anything worth being robbed for,’ objected Gwyn, prodding the corpse with his foot.

‘His scrip looks empty, but you’d better make sure,’ ordered de Wolfe, indicating the frayed leather purse on the man’s belt.

Gwyn pulled it off and squeezed it, feeling nothing inside. He opened the flap and upended it over his palm. ‘That’s odd!’ he boomed. ‘Let’s have that light a bit nearer, Edwin.’

As they stooped over the lantern, they could see small flecks glistening in its light.

‘Shreds of gold leaf, just like we found on that fellow robbed at Clyst St Mary! Bloody strange, that!’ observed Gwyn.

De Wolfe rubbed at his stubble thoughtfully, but could make no sense of the coincidence. He decided to leave his inquest until the afternoon, giving Gwyn time to round up as many of the previous night’s patrons as he could find, to form a jury. Meanwhile, they adjourned down to the taproom for some ale and food, while they discussed the matter. As soon as Nesta’s maids had scurried in with bread, cold meat and cheese, and Edwin had brought brimming pots of the best brew, they sat around a table and tried to make sense of this violent death. Thomas seemed very pensive as he sat picking at his breakfast.

‘I’ve been thinking about what the other dead man said before he passed away,’ he offered timidly.

Though Gwyn was playfully scornful of the little clerk, John de Wolfe had learned to respect the ex-priest’s learning and intelligence.

‘What’s going through that devious mind of yours, Thomas?’ he asked encouragingly.

‘This gold leaf-that must surely link them, it’s not a common thing to find in poor men’s pouches. And gold leaf is usually applied to valuable or sacred objects.’

‘How’s that connected with whatever that robbed fellow said in Clyst?’ asked the sharp-witted Nesta.

‘It comes back to me now-the old man in Clyst said the victim had uttered the words “Barzak” and “Glastonbury”.’

‘If he was walking northward through that village, he may well have been making for Glastonbury, so what’s the mystery?’ grunted Gwyn.

‘It’s the oldest abbey in England-Joseph of Arimathaea and perhaps even the Lord Jesus himself may have visited there,’ said Thomas, crossing himself devoutly. ‘But it’s the other word he uttered that intrigues me-Barzak!’

‘What the hell’s a barzak?’ growled the big Cornishman, determined to deflate his little friend.

‘Not what, but who?’ retorted Thomas. ‘I recollect the legend now, it’s been told around our abbeys and cathedrals for many years. It’s a curse, which again the old man in Clyst mentioned.’

Nesta, Edwin and even Gwyn were now intrigued, but de Wolfe was his usual impatient self.

‘Well, get on with it, Thomas! What are you trying to say?’

‘The Templars brought this story back long ago, of a tainted relic from the Holy City.’ He crossed himself yet again. ‘It seems that a fragment of the True Cross was cursed by a custodian called Barzak and anyone handling it died a violent death as soon as it left his possession. The relic has been virtually hidden away somewhere in France for many years-I seem to have heard it was in Fontrevault, where old King Henry’s buried. It was useless as an attraction for pilgrims, as they learned to shun it.’

The coroner pondered this for a moment, as he supped the last of his ale. ‘So why should this thing turn up in Devon?’ he asked dubiously.

Thomas shrugged his humped shoulder. ‘Perhaps the man in Clyst had brought it from France-he could have been coming from the port of Topsham, if he was on his way to Glastonbury.’

‘Sounds bloody far fetched to me!’ mumbled Gwyn through a mouthful of bread and cheese.

De Wolfe stood up and brushed crumbs from his long grey tunic.

‘It’s all we’ve got to go on so far. Thomas, you’re the one with the religious connections, so go around and see if you can find any rumours about a relic. And you, Gwyn, round up as many men who were drinking in here last night as you can and get them down here before vesper bell this afternoon. I’ll go and tell our dear sheriff we’ve had a murder in the city.’

The coroner’s brother-in-law, Sir Richard de Revelle, was busy with his chief clerk in his chamber in the keep of Rougemont when John arrived. He sat at a table, poring over parchments that listed tax collections, ready for the following week’s visit to the Exchequer at Winchester. More concerned with money than justice, the sheriff was supremely uninterested in the death of a lodger in an alehouse, until he heard that the man was a priest. At this news, de Revelle sat back and stared at de Wolfe.

‘A priest? Staying in that common tavern, run by that Welsh whore?’

John resisted the temptation to punch him on the nose, as he had suffered this particular provocation many times before.

‘My officer and clerk are about the town now, trying to find out more about him,’ he replied stonily. ‘There may be a connection with the murder of a chapman yesterday-probably by outlaws.’

De Revelle was more concerned about the man being a cleric, not out of any particular concern for the welfare of priests, but because he was a political ally of Bishop Henry Marshal in their covert campaign to put Prince John on the throne in place of Richard the Lionheart. De Revelle was always on the lookout for any opportunity to further ingratiate himself with the prelate, so he felt it might be worth stirring himself to catch the killer, if it raised his stock with the bishop. He demanded to know the details of the crime and John explained the circumstances of both deaths, but held back Thomas’s suggestion about the cursed relic.

Richard leant back in his chair and stroked his neatly pointed beard thoughtfully. He was a small, dapper man, with a foxy face. Fond of showy garments, today he wore a bright green tunic with yellow embroidery around neck and hem, with a cloak of fine brown wool trimmed with squirrel fur thrown over his shoulders against the chill of the cold, dank chamber.

‘A gang of outlaws could hardly have cut the man’s throat in the upstairs of a city alehouse-even though that Bush is a den of iniquity!’ he sneered, determined to taunt his sister’s husband with reminders of his infidelity. ‘Far more likely that your doxy turned a blind eye to some local robber who preys on her guests.’

Once again, John refused to rise to the bait and suggested that a squad of soldiers should be sent to clear the outlaws from the woods around Clyst St Mary. De Revelle dismissed this idea with a wave of his beringed hand.

‘A waste of time! Every bit of forest in Devon is crawling with these outcasts. Trying to find them is like looking for a needle in a haystack. But I want to catch the killer of this priest, for the bishop will be on my neck as soon as he hears about it.’

John decided to keep Thomas’s doubts about the genuineness of the priest to himself for the moment, else Richard’s interest would rapidly evaporate. With a muttered promise to keep the sheriff up to date with progress, he left his brother-in-law to continue his embezzlement of funds from the county’s finances and went back to his own bleak office in the gatehouse.

With both his assistants out on the streets, de Wolfe felt obliged to occupy himself and reluctantly turned back to his reading lessons, slowly tracing the Latin script with a forefinger and mumbling the words under his breath. An east wind whistled through the open window slits and he huddled deeper into his cloak as the morning wore on. In spite of the discomfort, which he had learned to endure after twenty years’ campaigning in a range of climates from Scotland to Palestine, he eventually fell asleep from the sheer boredom of his lessons, and jerked himself awake only several hours later when Thomas de Peyne limped up the stairs and pushed through the sacking over the doorway.

‘I’ve found who he was, master-and where he came from!’ squeaked the little ex-priest excitedly, proud of himself for being able to be of help to this grim man to whom he owed so much for giving him a job after his disgrace. John, still half asleep, glared bleary eyed at his clerk. ‘Tell me about it,’ he grunted.

‘I went first to the cathedral and made enquiries among the vicars and secondaries, but no one had any news of such a priest. Then I went down to St John’s Priory on the river, but again they had seen no one like that. I tried a couple of the city churches with no result, then ventured into Bretayne to call at St Nicholas Priory.’

John groaned. ‘You’re getting as bad as Gwyn for spinning out a tale! Get to the point, man!’

Unabashed, Thomas dropped on to his stool and gesticulated as he spoke. ‘One of the younger brothers there told me that a rough-looking priest had called yesterday and had talked with Prior Vincent. I asked to see the prior, but he refused to talk to me. However, his secretary told me that the man said he was Gervase of Somerset and that he tried to sell a valuable relic to the prior, but wanted far too much money for it.’

‘Did he say where he was going after leaving St Nicholas?’ demanded the coroner.

The clerk shook his head ruefully. ‘No, but he muttered something about other great abbeys being glad of the offer, like Buckfast or Glastonbury.’

De Wolfe reached out a long arm and clapped Thomas on the shoulder.

‘Well done, young man! I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

The clerk glowed with pride at such rare praise from his master.

‘The secretary didn’t tell me how much the man wanted for the relic, sir-but it must have been many pounds, by the indignation in his voice. Well worth killing for, I’m sure.’

The coroner jumped up from his table and strode to a window slit, staring blankly down over the city as he pondered. ‘But where is it now? And who the hell knew that this Gervase possessed it? And who is this priest, anyway? Where did he get the relic?’

Eager to please, Thomas applied his sharp mind to the problems. ‘If he really was a priest! I’ve got my doubts, he looked much too rough. And as to where he was going, then the two abbeys he spoke of seem the most likely places to raise money on a religious relic.’

De Wolfe turned from the window. ‘Well, he’s not going anywhere now, other than a pauper’s grave! But his killer must be trying to sell the thing in his place.’

He was interrupted by Gwyn lumbering into the chamber, to report that he had found a score of men who were in the Bush the previous night and had warned them to assemble as a jury in the back yard of the inn later that day. Thomas proudly repeated his story for the Cornishman’s benefit, and the coroner’s officer tugged at his long ginger moustaches as an aid to thought.

‘Then we’d best get those monks from St Nicholas down to the inquest,’ he suggested. ‘At least they can identify the dead ’un.’

De Wolfe agreed and told Gwyn to go up to the priory after his dinner and summon them to the Bush. ‘Better take Thomas with you, he might be more tactful with a bunch of Benedictines than you. They can be an awkward lot, if they’re not handled right.’

His warning was all too prophetic, for when he came back to the gatehouse after a silent meal with Matilda in Martin’s Lane, a glowering Gwyn reported that Prior Vincent had refused point blank to come to any inquest and forbade any of his monks to attend. ‘He said you had no authority over men of God and if you didn’t like it, you could appeal to the Pope!’

John cursed all intransigent monks, but failed to see what he could do about it. He was not sure how far a coroner’s powers stretched, as the whole system had been set up on the strength of one paragraph in the Articles of Eyre at Rochester in September.

For once Thomas, usually a fountain of knowledge on all matters ecclestiastical, was unable to help him. ‘I know the cathedral precinct is outside the jurisdiction of both the city burgesses and the sheriff, as well as yourself, master,’ he offered. ‘But the Lord Bishop has voluntarily handed over his rights in respect of killings or other serious crimes of violence within the Close.’

‘I know, but that doesn’t help us in respect of monks inside a closed community like St Nicholas,’ grunted de Wolfe. ‘I’ll have to seek the advice of your uncle.’

Half an hour later, he was sitting in the house of the Archdeacon of Exeter, one of the row of canon’s dwellings that formed the northern boundary of the cathedral Close. John de Alençon was a thin, ascetic man with wiry grey hair around his shaved tonsure. His face was lined and care-worn, but relieved by a pair of bright blue eyes. The two Johns were good friends, though de Wolfe had little love for many of the other twenty-four canons, who, like the bishop himself, tended to be supporters of Prince John. De Alençon was fervently loyal to King Richard, as was the coroner, and this contributed to the bond between them. De Wolfe explained the situation, as they sat over two cups of good Poitou wine.

‘So can I insist that this prior and his secretary appear at the inquest? They are the only ones who met the fellow before he was killed.’

The lean canon rubbed his nose thoughtfully. ‘Like you, I have no idea of the powers of this new office of coroner. It seems to have been dreamed up by Hubert Walter to squeeze more money out of the populace for our sovereign’s benefit.’

Hubert Walter was the Chief Justiciar and virtually ruler of England, now that the King had gone back to France, never to return. Hubert was also Archbishop of Canterbury and had been second-in-command of the King’s armies when John was in the Holy Land.

‘If they were your vicars in the cathedral, would you order them to attend?’ persisted the coroner.

De Alençon shook his head. ‘That’s a different matter, John. St Nicholas is not only a priory, outside the control of this cathedral-it’s also a daughter establisment of Battle Abbey in Sussex, a powerful institution. Only their abbot could decide the issue-and it would take you the best part of a fortnight to get an answer there!’

De Wolfe swore under his breath. ‘Is there nothing we can do?’ he asked testily.

The archdeacon smiled and downed the last of his wine, before rising.

‘We can both take a walk up there and try a little gentle persuasion. I should leave that big sword at home, John-this requires diplomacy, not brute force!’

As the cathedral bells tolled for the late afternoon vespers, a crowd began assembling behind the Bush tavern in Idle Lane. The muddy back yard was big enough to accommodate them between the cook-shed, the brewing hut, the pigsties and the privies. Gwyn made them shuffle into a half-circle around one of the trestle tables brought from the taproom, on which lay an ominously still figure covered with a couple of empty barley sacks.

The big Cornishman used his stentorian voice to formally open the proceedings, as he bawled, ‘All ye who have anything to do before the King’s coroner for the county of Devon, draw near and give your attendance!’

As de Wolfe waited at the head of the makeshift bier, he noticed that the sheriff had just arrived with Canon Thomas de Boterellis, the cathedral’s precentor, whose duties were to organize the many daily services. John tried in vain to think of some reason why they should have taken an interest in a lowly tavern death. The pair, one gaudily dressed in a bright green tunic and a cloak, the other in a cowled black cassock, pushed their way through the onlookers to stand alongside the prior’s secretary from St Nicholas. When John and the archdeacon had gone to the priory, they had received a frosty reception from Anselm, but after some placatory words from de Alençon, he had softened enough to come to a compromise. He still refused to leave the priory himself, but agreed that his secretary, Brother Basil, could attend to confirm the identity of the victim.

Now de Wolfe stepped forward to begin the inquest and glared along the line of jurors, who were as much witnesses as judges, as they were the ones who were in the alehouse the previous night.

‘We are here to enquire into the death of a man thought to be Gervase of Somerset, though that may or may not be true. Anyway, it’s certainly true that he’s dead!’

There were a couple of dutiful titters at his attempt at levity, which brought another fercious scowl to the coroner’s face. Then he called forward the maid Lucy, who was the First Finder of the body. She briefly described how she had come across the corpse and had screamed out for the potman and the landlady. Strictly speaking, the First Finder was supposed to raise the hue and cry, by knocking up the nearest four households and starting a hunt for the killer. That might be possible in a village, but in a city it was impracticable.

‘The man had been dead for some hours,’ declared de Wolfe. ‘The body was cold and stiff when I examined it early this morning, so there would be no point in seeking the killer, who would have been long gone.’

John noticed that the sheriff’s eyebrows had risen in a supercilious smile and he had the uneasy feeling that de Revelle was there to make trouble. He had to press on, however, and deal with the next issue, that of identity. He asked Brother Basil to step forward, and the thin young man, enveloped in a black robe too large for him, came hesitantly to the front. At a sign from John, Gwyn whisked one of the sacks off the corpse and, to a chorus of gasps and oaths from the audience, exposed the upper half of the body. The white face contrasted ghoulishly with the dark red blood clot that filled the gaping wound in the neck and spread over the adjacent skin and clothing.

‘Brother, is this the man who came to the priory of St Nicholas yesterday?’

The young monk took a few tentative steps nearer the cadaver and stared at the face, then moved slightly so that he could inspect the ragged tonsure on the top of the head. With a face as pale as that of the corpse, he nodded, and replied in a tremulous voice.

‘That’s the man, Crowner. He gave his name as Gervase and said he was a parish priest from Somerset, returning from his pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.’

He explained about the offer of the relic of the True Cross and the rather unusual fact that he had a genuine letter of authentication signed and sealed by a crusading knight.

‘Were you satisfied that this man was truly a priest?’ demanded de Wolfe.

The monk hesitated. ‘It was hard to decide, sir. He wore a cassock, as you see, but it was in a poor state, even for one who had endured the hardships of a pilgrimage. And his tonsure was strange, though again, he may have just restored it after having been on such a long journey.’

‘You seem doubtful, Brother. What did Prior Anselm think?’

The young secretary shuffled his feet uneasily. ‘He shared my concerns, he told me later. But the man could read the parchment he brought and he spoke some Latin to one of our brothers in the garden. Who else but a priest could have done that?’

Nesta was called to confirm that the dead man had arrived at the tavern the previous evening and had paid for a meal and lodging for the night, but could add little else.

‘Did you think it strange that a priest should need to stay at an inn?’ asked John, trying to keep his voice as gruff as with the other witnesses, though everyone present was well aware of his relationship with the landlady of the Bush.

‘It was a little unusual, though I have had travelling clerics lodge here before, when all the cathedral accommodation was full. He said that the morrow he was promised a bed at Buckfast Abbey and just needed a mattress here for the night.’ She further agreed that she had noticed nothing suspicious going on in the loft the previous night and said that people lodging there came up and down the ladder at will, so she would have no reason to take notice of them on a busy evening.

There was no other evidence to be gained, so de Wolfe made the jury file past the corpse to inspect it more closely. Some were hesitant, others avidly curious, and when they had finished the coroner barked his instructions at them.

‘You must come to a verdict about this yourselves, but I see no alternative to you declaring that this man, said to be called Gervase of Somerset, was unlawfully slain by a person or persons unknown.’

He glared along the line of sheepish men and boys, as if challenging them to contradict him-and a moment later, after some hurried murmuring among themselves, one stepped forward and mumbled their agreement. John was just about to wind up with a final formal declaration for Thomas to write on his parchment roll when an unexpected and unwelcome interruption took place. Richard de Revelle strode forward and officiously held up a hand to halt the proceedings.

‘Not so fast, Coroner! There’s a witness you’ve not heard.’

His thin, foxy face wore a smug expression which he failed to restrain, as de Wolfe glowered angrily at this intrusion.

‘What are you talking about? This is my inquest, you’ve no right to interrupt.’

‘I am the sheriff! I can do what I please when it comes to the administration of justice,’ sneered de Revelle. ‘You claim this was a killing by persons unknown, but I see little effort on your part to discover who it was.’

He swung round and beckoned to someone at the back of the crowd. Reluctantly, a thin, middle-aged man came forward; John recognised him as a patron of the Bush, a servant from one of the canons’ houses in the Close.

‘What can this man tell us that we don’t already know?’ demanded de Wolfe, glowering at his brother-in-law, who stood with a self-satisfied smirk on his face.

The sheriff ignored the question and addressed himself to the man, who stood before them, obviously ill at ease.

‘You are Martin Bedel, a servant of Canon de Boterellis?’

The older man, dressed in a plain brown tunic over cross-gartered leggings, bobbed his head. ‘Yes, sir. I am the precentor’s bottler.’

This was the servant that attended to the drink in the house.

‘And you frequent this inn?’ snapped de Revelle.

‘Aye, I often come for company and a gossip, when my duties allow. Sometimes I come to break my fast in the morning, for their cooking is the best in the city.’

There was a snigger from the crowd, quickly suppressed when the sheriff glared around at them. De Wolfe frowned across at Gwyn, who shrugged to indicate that this must be one of the customers he had failed to round up for the inquest.

‘And were you here last evening-and again this morning?’ persisted Richard.

The coroner’s impatience and foreboding got the better of him. ‘What is the point of these questions? If he knows anything, he should have come forward before.’

‘Well, he’s coming forward now, thanks to the orders of his master, the precentor,’ replied the sheriff complacently. He turned back to the bottler. ‘What did you see last night?’

‘Well, it was as usual, sir. Many people inside, comings and goings up the ladder to the loft. Some I knew, some I didn’t. Mistress Nesta herself climbed up a few times.’

‘What of it?’ snarled de Wolfe. ‘She has her sleeping-room up there.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you’re well aware of that!’ said de Revelle, sarcastically, this time ignoring the suppressed snigger from the audience. ‘But Martin, you were also here this morning for your breakfast, so what did you see then?’

The wizened servant shuffled his feet as he gave an abashed glance at both Nesta and the coroner. ‘I saw the landlady coming down the ladder, looking pale and shaken. There was blood on her apron, sir.’

A buzz of concern ran around the crowd assembled in the yard. But de Wolfe gave a derisive bark. ‘For God’s sake, she had just been up to see if she could aid the man! Look at him, he was weltered in blood, of course she would get soiled!’

‘The other maid had no blood upon her!’ retorted the sheriff.

‘Then she probably kept well clear of the corpse!’ roared de Wolfe.

‘Probably? You make assumptions, Coroner.’ The sheriff turned back to the discomfited Martin. ‘Was this before or after the alarm was raised by this other “unsullied” maid?’ Richard emphasized the word sarcastically.

The bottler looked more embarrassed than ever. ‘I feel pretty sure it was before, sir.’

‘Pretty sure?’ snarled de Wolfe. ‘What sort of evidence is that? De Revelle, you are wasting my time!’

Now Thomas de Boterellis pushed forward and stood alongside the sheriff. He was a heavily built, podgy man, with a waxy complexion to his face, from which two rather piggy eyes looked out coldly upon the world.

‘My servant told me this early this morning, de Wolfe. I felt it my duty to notify Richard de Revelle, as it was a matter relating to a serious crime.’

John snorted in disbelief. ‘Since when does a cathedral precentor go running to a sheriff over a death in an alehouse?’

‘Sir Richard is a particular friend of mine. We had business this morning and I happened to mention the matter,’ retorted the canon pompously.

‘And cockerels may happen to lay eggs!’ snapped de Wolfe. ‘Did the pair of you just happen to be coming all the way down here to the lower town this morning?’

The sheriff blustered his way back into the acrimonious conversation.

‘The fact remains that this man was done to death in this woman’s tavern. She sleeps within a few yards of where he was killed, she was seen to go up and down repeatedly, she denied any knowledge of the death, apparently a valuable object is missing-and she was seen by a reputable witness to have blood on her clothes!’

‘All of which means absolutely nothing!’ roared John. ‘This stupid man can’t even remember if he saw the blood on the lady before or after the body was discovered!’

‘I seem to recollect that it was before,’ bleated Martin, trying to claw his way back into his master’s favour.

Now de Wolfe completely lost his temper. ‘Listen! My inquest is over, my jury has agreed the verdict and that’s the end of it, until we find the real culprit!’ he roared. ‘So clear off, all of you, and attend to your own affairs!’

The crowd, hugely intrigued to see this public row between their betters, stood gaping at the performance until Gwyn started to shoo them away, but de Revelle and the precentor stood their ground.

‘Unless you produce this “real culprit” very soon, John, the execution of my own duty to keep the peace by arresting malefactors might not be to your liking!’

With this parting threat, he took the arm of de Boterellis and pushed through the dispersing crowd, leaving the coroner to stand fuming with rage, tinged with a little apprehension.

An hour later, a council of war was held in the Bush, with all the staff of the inn and the coroner’s team clustered around a table, food and ale before them. John was concerned at the naked threat that the sheriff had made against Nesta.

‘That bastard’s got it in for you, Crowner,’ said Gwyn, through a mouthful of bread and cheese. He was feeling a little crestfallen for having failed to track down the precentor’s bottler to include him in his inquest jury, but his master had no blame for him, realizing that it was impossible to identify everyone who might have visited the alehouse the previous night.

‘As usual, de Revelle’s trying to get back at me for antagonizing him over his support for Prince John,’ growled de Wolfe. ‘That damned precentor is the same way inclined, currying favour with the bishop, who was one of the main players in the last revolt.’

When Richard the Lionheart was imprisoned in Germany, his younger brother John had made an abortive attempt to seize the throne, and many of the barons and senior clerics who supported him were still covertly plotting another uprising.

‘How can we protect dear Nesta?’ broke in the ever practical Thomas, who worshipped the Welshwoman for her unfailing kindness to him.

‘As the bloody sheriff said, by finding the real killer,’ replied de Wolfe. ‘And quickly, for I suspect that de Revelle is keen to cause me as much trouble as possible, may God rot him!’ He turned to his mistress, who was looking defiant, but apprehensive. ‘Let’s get the story quite clear, cariad. Lucy screamed out when she found the body, so you ran up to the loft and went to look at it. That’s when you got blood on your apron?’

‘Of course! I bent down to make sure he was dead and got blood on my hands from the edge of the blanket. I wiped them on my apron, which was also soiled at the hem from blood on the floor.’

‘We need to find the bastard who did this, that’s the best way of getting Nesta off the hook,’ grunted Gwyn. ‘I’ll get back on the streets and find every man-jack that was in here last night and this morning-and every whore, too! I’ll shake them all until their teeth rattle, to get ’em to tell me all they know!’

As good as his word, he swallowed the last of his ale and lumbered out into Idle Lane, leaving Thomas de Peyne to continue the debate.

‘We know now how that gold leaf got from Clyst St Mary to this place,’ he declared. ‘This man Gervase must have stolen it from that chapman.’

‘Which surely means that he was no priest, but a robber-probably an outlaw,’ observed Edwin.

‘Or had been a priest once, like me,’ added Thomas sadly. ‘But who would have known that he was carrying a valuable object, worth killing for?’

‘He wasn’t flashing it around in here, was he, Nesta?’ asked John.

She shook her head emphatically. ‘No, he sat and had his food at that table over there, then drank a quart of ale and went up to bed. I hardly noticed him. Certainly he had no conversation with anyone else, as far as I remember.’

Edwin, Lucy and the other maid agreed, confirming that the murder victim seemed a shadowy figure who met no one else that evening. They talked a while longer, but nothing new came to mind, and with considerable unease at having to leave Nesta behind at the inn, John reluctantly left for Martin’s Lane and another cheerless supper with his wife.

Two hours before noon the next day the coroner, together with his clerk Thomas, were at the gallows field on Magdalene Street, half a mile outside the South Gate. Executions took place once or twice a week, depending on how many felons had been sentenced by the Shire Court or the Burgess Court. When the royal judges came to the city, either as Commissioners of Gaol Delivery or at the very infrequent Eyre of Assize, the gallows was busier, but this morning there were only three customers to be dispatched into the next, and hopefully better, life. The coroner had to be present, as he was responsible for confiscating all the worldly goods of the victim for the King’s treasury and recording the event on his rolls.

Though mutilation, either cutting off a hand, castration or blinding, was a common penalty for serious assault or minor theft, murder or stealing anything worth more than twelve pence was a hanging offence, as was the capture of anyone previously outlawed. One of today’s felons was such an outlaw, another being a tanner who had beaten his wife’s lover to death on catching them in flagrante delicto and the third a boy of fifteen who had stolen a pewter jug worth twenty pence.

A small crowd had assembled to watch the proceedings, some of them relatives of the condemned, the others spectators who came regularly, regarding the executions as a form of entertainment. These were mainly old men, housewives and grandmothers, with a horde of toddlers and urchins running around them. A few pedlars and pie-men always attended, making a reasonable trade as the spectators waited for the show to begin. Even the town beggars and a couple of hooded lepers lingered on the edge of the crowd, rattling their bowls and crying for alms.

The gallows was a massive beam supported at either end by two tree trunks. Five rope nooses dangled from it and ladders were propped at both ends. There were a number of hangmen in Exeter, all part time, as they also followed other trades. Today a slaughterman from the Shambles was officiating; he favoured the use of an ox-cart, rather than pushing the victims off a ladder. Hands lashed behind them, the victims were stood together on a plank across the cart, directly underneath the gallows. The executioner climbed up, put a rope around each neck, then gave the ox a smart smack across the rump, though it was so used to the routine that it hardly needed such a signal. As it trundled forward, the three poor wretches were left hanging momentarily in space, their screams abruptly cut off as the strangling rope cut into their throats. Immediately, members of the families of two of the condemned rushed forward and dragged down violently on their legs to shorten their suffering, but the outlaw, who had no one to see him off, was left to kick and twitch for several minutes until death mercifully overtook him.

John watched the proceedings impassively, as violent and sudden death held no novelty for him, after more than twenty years on the battlefields of Ireland, France and the Holy Land. Thomas de Peyne was not made of such stern stuff and always turned his head away as the ox-cart began to move. As soon as the bodies had stopped dancing on their ropes, the crowd began to drift away, except for the wailing families, who lingered with their handcarts to claim the bodies for burial.

The coroner waited for his clerk to gather up his writing materials and stow them away in his shoulder bag, then began walking back towards the city walls. It was hardly worth saddling up his stallion Odin for such a short distance, and within a few minutes they were approaching Exeter’s massive South Gate, where they saw a large figure coming towards them with a familiar rolling gait.

‘Here’s Gwyn. What’s he want?’ demanded Thomas.

The usually phlegmatic Cornishman was agitated. ‘I’ve found a man who saw something in the Bush last night,’ he boomed. As they hurried back towards Idle Lane, the officer explained that he had managed to round up another dozen men who had been drinking in the tavern, and one of them remembered seeing a hooded man coming down the ladder late that night. ‘He says he wasn’t in a priest’s garb, but the hood was over his face and he had no cause to make any effort to recognize him.’

‘At least it lessens the threat against Nesta, if we have a new possibility,’ muttered John. ‘Have you kept this man at the Bush?’

‘They’re all there, Crowner. I told them they must wait until you came.’

The new witnesses were in the taproom when they arrived, taking advantage of the wait to drink more ale. John questioned the man Gwyn had found, but he was unable to add any more to his recollection that the hooded man had come down the steps and vanished out of the front door.

‘His robe was grey and dirty, Crowner. I can say no more about him than that he was tall.’

John questioned all the other men, but none of them had noticed the mysterious figure, and he became frustrated that there seemed no way of identifying the fellow.

‘He may have nothing to do with it,’ cautioned Thomas tentatively. ‘Perhaps he was one of the other lodgers from the loft.’

Nesta shook her head as she stood listening. ‘None of those travellers was particularly tall-and none wore a dirty grey robe,’ she said firmly.

John de Wolfe snarled again at the men, trying to force someone to remember more details, but they all shook their heads sadly, despite the fact that they would have liked to help both the coroner and his popular mistress.

Then suddenly there was a voice from behind him, a sing-song piping that came from a vacant-faced youth who had been squatting in a corner.

‘I know who he was! I begged him for a ha’penny for ale when he came out of the door.’

There was a sudden silence as everyone turned to look down at the ragged boy. Though not an idiot, he was ‘simple’, as the tolerant locals called him, a loose-lipped, runny-nosed lad with an abnormally big head. Nesta, who gave him spare food almost every day, crouched down beside him and spoke to him gently.

‘Peter, did you see his face? Who was he?’

The boy looked at her and then at the expectant men with an almost pitying expression.

‘Don’t you know? It was Simon Claver, him with the rotten nose that used to live in Smythen Street.’

At this, there was a babble of voices from the surrounding men, cut short by de Wolfe’s harsh voice.

‘Who in hell is Simon Claver?’ he demanded.

‘He was a smith, from just up the road here,’ answered the potman.

‘Simon beat up his brother-in-law more than a year ago, half killed him!’

There were murmurs of agreement from the others. ‘He escaped the hue and cry and secured sanctuary in Holy Trinity,’ continued old Edwin, who knew all the local scandals. ‘Then he abjured the realm, but ran away before he got ship at Topsham, so he was outlawed.’

The coroner looked across at Gwyn and nodded. ‘Sounds as if he could be our man-but where the hell do we look for him?’

De Wolfe’s desire to lay his hands on the killer of Gervase was multiplied a thousandfold by that evening, as while he was sitting at his cheerless supper table with Matilda, Gwyn arrived in a state of extreme agitation to report that the sheriff had arrested Nesta on suspicion of murder.

‘The bastard sent half a dozen men-at-arms to the Bush and they’ve dragged her off to Rougemont!’

Though Gwyn was unwelcome in the house because of his wife’s antipathy to what she called ‘Celtic savages’, the urgency of the situation made both him and his master careless of her antagonism.

‘There’s even talk of putting her to the ordeal of water,’ roared Gwyn angrily. This was a primitive test for guilt reserved for women, whereby they were thrown bound hand and foot into deep water. If they sank, they were innocent; if they floated, they were guilty and hanged. Men were forced to run barefoot over nine red-hot ploughshares or pick a stone from the bottom of a cask of boiling water-if burns developed, they were judged guilty.

John leapt up from the supper table, his stool crashing over behind him.

‘She can’t be put in those foul cells under the keep!’ he yelled. ‘Not with that evil pervert Stigand as her gaoler.’ He glared across at his wife. ‘Your damned brother is doing this out of sheer malice, Matilda! No woman should be kept in Rougemont at the mercy of that fat swine!’

Matilda looked back impassively at her husband for a long moment, and John wondered whether she was going to use this as a way of punishing him.

Then she too rose from her chair and came around to him.

‘Call Lucille to bring my mantle. I’ll come with you to see Richard-but only to keep that woman from the cells. I’ll not interfere in anything else.’

The next morning saw John de Wolfe at the castle at the crack of dawn, after an almost sleepless night worrying about Nesta and the implacable resolve of Richard de Revelle to blame her for the killing at the Bush.

In the cold morning light of his gatehouse chamber, he told Gwyn and Thomas what had transpired the previous evening when he had confronted the sheriff.

‘Thank God my wife had enough compassion to persuade her brother to lock Nesta in an empty chamber on the upper floor of the keep, rather than in that hellhole in the undercroft. Gabriel’s wife will attend her and at least see that she is fed until I can get her released.’

‘What about the bloody sheriff?’ growled Gwyn. ‘Is there no chance of him coming to his senses over this?’

John shook his head. ‘He has the bit between his teeth, aided by that damned precentor. This is a heaven-sent opportunity for them to get even with me for hounding them about their treacherous sympathy for Prince John.’

Thomas looked even more miserable than usual, hunched on his stool, wringing his hands in anguish. ‘How can we save dear Nesta, Crowner? I fear for her very life, now that the sheriff is set upon making her a scapegoat.’

‘Find the real killer, this Simon Claver! I tried to persuade de Revelle last night that this was the obvious way, but his mind is as closed as his ears. He refused even to countenance a search for the man, saying that the word of an imbecile lad was no grounds for looking for anyone other than the landlady of the tavern!’

‘But where the hell would we start looking, Crowner?’ observed Gwyn glumly.

‘That stolen relic is of no value to the thief until he can sell it,’ pointed out Thomas. ‘He has to find a buyer, and the only people interested would be religious houses.’

De Wolfe drummed his fingers on his table. ‘He may first have gone back to his outlaw gang in the forest. I couldn’t persuade the sheriff to lift a finger against them, he claimed it was a waste of effort.’

Gwyn scratched a few fleas from his unruly red thatch as he thought.

‘Gabriel told me that de Revelle was leaving this morning for his manor at Tiverton, to spend a few nights with his wife, God help her. Maybe we can persuade Ralph Morin to take out a posse while the sheriff’s away?’

The ‘posse comitatus’ was an invention of old King Henry, who authorized each county to mount bands of armed men to seek out wrongdoers when necessary. The idea appealed to the coroner, and he went off to the keep to seek his friend the constable, who commanded all the men-at-arms of the castle garrison. Though Ralph had no love for de Revelle, he was at first uneasy about going against his wishes, but John persuaded him that the sheriff had not actually prohibited a search, only shown a lack of enthusiasm.

By the tenth hour, a score of soldiers, led by Morin and Sergeant Gabriel, were marching over the drawbridge of Rougemont and meeting up at the South Gate with the coroner, his officer and another twenty volunteers from the Bush. These had rallied around to try to help the plight of their favourite innkeeper, and with a motley collection of swords, pikes and daggers, they tagged on behind the column of soldiers. All were on foot, as horses were of no use for combing the woods for fugitives.

In less than two hours, the posse was in position, half the men forming a line that entered the forest from the side where the chapman had been killed, the rest two miles away, approaching from the main track to the north. The men-at-arms, dressed in partial battledress of iron helmets and boiled leather jerkins, alternated with the city volunteers.

De Wolfe and his officer were with the southern party, the constable and his sergeant with the others. They had little hope of catching all the scattered outlaws, who infested every patch of forest, but within three hours their pincer movement through the almost bare trees and scrub managed to grab two men, one found cowering in a bramble thicket, the other up a tree. The latter betrayed his presence when the branch broke and he fell with a scream and a crash within fifty yards of the nearest soldier. With a twisted ankle, he was unable to make a run for it, and when the two lines of searchers met up, de Wolfe and Morin decided that, given the failing light, they had done all they could that day.

The two captives, desperately frightened, ragged wrecks of humanity, were forced to their knees inside the wide circle of their hunters. As outlaws, they were well aware that their lives were forfeit and it was only the means of their deaths which lay in the balance.

John stood over them, sliding his great sword partly out of its scabbard, then slamming it back again.

‘We are entitled to strike off your heads here and now!’ he rasped. ‘The men I appoint to do it will be pleased to earn an easy five shillings’ bounty. So is there anything you have to say that might delay that moment?’

Nothing could have been more effective in loosening their tongues than the sight and sound of that sword, and within a few moments John learned that Gervase and Simon Claver had indeed been members of their outlaw band.

‘Simon reckoned he was entitled to a bigger share of Gervase’s loot, so he said he was going after him in Exeter,’ quavered the older captive, a toothless scarecrow with some pustulous disease of his hands and neck.

‘Just before he left, Gervase let slip the fact that some relic in a little box might be valuable,’ croaked the younger man with the injured leg.

‘That set Simon thinking and he left us the next day.’

The cavalcade set off for Exeter, the older man half supporting, half dragging the other along the track, both destined for the cells in Rougemont until they were dispatched on the next hanging day.

As the four leaders marched at the head of the column on the four miles back to the city, they discussed the results of their expedition.

‘It’s clear what happened now and we know the identity of the two villains,’ growled de Wolfe. ‘Ralph, there’s no reason now why Nesta should be kept locked in that damned chamber!’

The constable pulled at his beard, worried at his own position in all this. ‘I agree, John, but I can’t let her out until de Revelle gets back. I’ll be in enough trouble with him as it is, taking a troop of soldiers out of the city against his inclinations.’

‘He’ll be back in a couple of days, Crowner,’ said Gabriel, soothingly. ‘My wife will see she’s comfortable until then.’

John gave an angry grunt and Gwyn tactfully changed the subject.

‘What about finding this bastard Simon Claver? That would really put Nesta in the clear.’

De Wolfe rasped a hand over his black stubble as they walked faster in the gathering dusk, anxious to get to the South Gate before it closed at curfew. ‘Nesta said that this Gervase claimed he was going to get a bed at Buckfast Abbey the next night, though I wouldn’t trust anything he said.’

‘As your clerk mentioned, he has to sell the relic to a bunch of monks or priests to realize any profit on his theft,’ added Ralph Morin. ‘But from the direction that chapman was going, he could have been aiming east, to sell it somewhere like Wells Cathedral or Glastonbury Abbey.’

Gwyn nodded his shaggy head. ‘That old fellow in Clyst reckoned the dying man mentioned Glastonbury just before he passed out.’

With this information as the only clues they possessed, the coroner and the constable agreed to search in both directions as soon as the city gates opened in the morning.

‘You and Gwyn go east towards Somerset,’ suggested Ralph Morin, ‘and I’ll send Gabriel and a couple of men down the Plymouth road towards Buckfast. This fellow is on foot, so horsemen should catch him up, even though he may have had two days’ start.’

John spent a restless night, even though he knew Nesta could come to no harm in the castle, with the sheriff away and the sergeant’s wife pledged to look after her. Matilda was as surly as usual and made no mention over supper of her unexpected intercession on the Welshwoman’s behalf. Once again, John realized how little he understood Matilda, who was capable of surprising him with acts of kindness, even though she maintained her grim façade most of the time.

After a quick but substantial breakfast in his maid Mary’s cook-shed in the yard, the coroner went across to the stables opposite, where the farrier was saddling up the patient Odin, and a few moments later he rode out to meet Gwyn at Carfoix. They had agreed to leave Thomas behind, as his reluctant efforts at riding side-saddle on his miserable pony would only slow them down-and he was needed at Rougemont to write down the confessions of the two outlaws now incarcerated in the foul cells below the keep.

Gwyn was waiting cheerfully on his big brown mare, ready for anything the day might bring. As they trotted out of the South Gate and along past the empty gallows on the Honiton road, the coroner’s officer debated their chances of finding Simon Claver.

‘If he went westward, then he would have reached Buckfast by now, even on foot. But Gabriel and his men should still get news of him there.’

‘We have the better chance, if he’s making for Glastonbury or Wells,’ called de Wolfe, over the clip of the hoofs. ‘Few men will cover more than fifteen miles in these shortening days.’

Their fear was that, after Honiton, Simon might have turned off towards Bridport and Dorchester, if he was aiming for the abbeys and cathedrals of the south-east. But Somerset was still the best bet, thought John, and they kept on doggedly for the next few hours. The rutted track of the high road was in its best condition in this cold, dry weather, and they were able to put a good many miles behind them before dusk fell. They found an alehouse in a village beyond Ilminster and endured a poor meal there, before finding a heap of hay in a nearby tithe barn for a night’s sleep. The coroner and his officer had slept in far worse places during their campaigning days and were quite content with their accommodation.

The next morning, after some stale bread and hard cheese from Gwyn’s saddlebag, they were on their way again, John still anxious about Nesta, now that Richard de Revelle might have returned to Rougemont from his marital duties at Tiverton. They passed the usual thin stream of travellers going in both directions-pilgrims, merchants, ox-carts, flocks of sheep and a few pigs and goats, as well as the occasional chapman and pedlar to remind them of the relic dealer’s fate. An east wind now blew a fine powdering of snow on to the grey countryside, and John huddled deeper into his wolfskin cloak and pulled the hood up over his head. Gwyn now sported a leather shoulder cape with a pointed cowl, under which he wore an old barley sack wrapped around his neck.

They trotted on for another couple of hours, staring suspiciously at every traveller they passed, trudging along the highway. At an alehouse in a small hamlet, they stopped for some bread and meat, warming themselves with a pot of ale which the landlord mulled with a red-hot poker. They enquired whether any man with a rotted nose had called there in the past day or so, but no one had seen such a traveller.

When they went on their way again, under a leaden sky that promised more snow, Gwyn voiced a question that had been in de Wolfe’s mind.

‘How long are we to keep going, Crowner?’ he asked.

‘Until nightfall. We’ll turn back in the morning,’ grunted John. ‘By then we’ll have outdistanced him on foot. If we don’t see any sign of the swine, it means he must either have gone west or turned off to Dorchester.’

‘Then let’s hope Gabriel had better luck at Buckfast,’ prayed the Cornishman. But a mile farther on, the luck turned out to be theirs.

Here the road passed between dense woods on either side, the trees coming right down to the edge of the track. A cart laden with straw passed them in the opposite direction, and on the empty road ahead, they saw a lone figure trudging along, a long staff in one hand. As they came nearer, they saw that he wore a shabby grey mantle with a hood and that he was limping slightly. From the back, he looked little different to scores of others they had encountered, but on hearing the clip of their horse’s hoofs, the man turned his head. Being an Exeter man, living near the Bush, he recognized the coroner immediately. Throwing down his staff, he ran for the shelter of the trees, only a few yards away. With a roar, Gwyn spurred his mare after him, but he was too late to reach him before the man vanished into the undergrowth that choked the spaces between the tall trees.

De Wolfe was only inches behind, and with a curse he slid from Odin’s back as Gwyn leapt from his own saddle and plunged into the forest after the fugitive. Though most of the leaves had fallen, there were tangled masses of bramble and bracken between the first trees, but once they were in deeper, the ground was almost bare and the three men pounded along, weaving between the trunks. Though Gwyn had a start, he was heavier than the wiry coroner and de Wolfe rapidly caught him up.

The man ahead seemed to have forgotten his limp, as fear of inevitable death gave him wings, but the long legs of the coroner defeated him in the next hundred yards. With a final yell, de Wolfe threw himself at the man’s back and brought him down, with Gwyn hard on his heels to make sure that he stayed there.

Panting with exertion, John drew his dagger and held it at the fugitive’s throat as soon as Gwyn turned him over. The grotesque corrugations on one side of the man’s nose removed any doubt that they had caught Simon Claver, who stared up at them in abject terror and the firm expectation that he was about to die.

The coroner reached Exeter around noon the next day, having pushed his heavy warhorse as fast as he could, though Odin was no sprinter. In his haste to get back to secure Nesta’s safety, de Wolfe had left Gwyn to ride back more slowly, as he had Simon Claver walking behind his mare, his bound wrists roped to the saddle-horn. It would be another day before they arrived, but de Wolfe wanted to get his mistress out of custody as soon as possible. His task was not helped by the fact that Simon had stoutly denied killing Gervase, even though they had found the faded gilt relic box in a pocket of his mantle.

On arrival at the castle, he hurried to the keep and found Ralph Morin in the constable’s chamber off the main hall.

‘He’s in a foul mood, John,’ were his first words as the coroner entered. ‘Lady Eleanor must have given him a bad time and he’s highly incensed that we took a raiding party into the forest against his wishes. You’ll have a hard task persuading him to release Nesta.’

De Wolfe told him of their successful capture of the outlaw and the recovery of the holy relic. ‘But the bastard resolutely refuses to confess to killing Gervase-he says he met him after he had been to St Nicholas Priory and Gervase agreed to let him take the thing to Glastonbury to sell, whereupon they would split the proceeds.’

Ralph gave a cynical snort. ‘A likely tale! But de Revelle will seize upon it, never fear!’

He was right, for when John went down the hall to the sheriff’s chamber, he was met with a mixture of anger, sarcasm and sheer spite.

‘The man is to hang whatever happens, so why should he tell anything but the truth? I’ll certainly not release the prime suspect on such flimsy grounds. This Claver is obviously an outlaw and a thief, but that doesn’t mean he killed that man in the inn.’

Nothing would shift the resolve of John’s obdurate brother-in-law, and the coroner left in a towering rage, promising to get the whole truth from Simon when he arrived, even if he had to torture him to within an inch of his life. On his way back to Martin’s Lane, he met his friend the archdeacon, and he poured out his problems to John de Alençon.

‘In some ways, this could be considered to be a matter for the Church,’ said the priest gravely. ‘I have heard of this relic and, given the provenance offered by that letter from Sir Geoffrey Mappestone, it has a good claim to be a genuine piece of the True Cross.’ His hand automatically strayed to his head, heart and shoulders, reminding de Wolfe of his clerk’s almost obsessive habit. ‘Even though apparently tainted, it is still a part of our Christian heritage and this outlaw should be made to fully confess how he came by it.’

When John suggested that Simon Claver should submit to the peine forte et dure, even the usually compassionate archdeacon agreed. When he heard that the sheriff was reluctant to get at the truth for reasons of his own, de Alençon declared that he would call upon de Revelle and make his own ecclesiastical demand that they extract the truth from the outlaw.

The next day, when Gwyn tugged the exhausted and footsore Simon up the drawbridge into Rougemont and across to the stinking undercroft below the keep, he found that preparations were already in hand to persuade the outlaw to speak more eloquently.

Stigand, the evil custodian of the gaol, was waddling across from an alcove with some thick plates of rusty iron, each about a foot square. With a loud clatter, he dropped these into a pile in the centre of the dank cellar, panting with the exertion, as his grossly obese body was not meant for heavy work. When the coroner’s officer arrived with the new prisoner, Stigand shackled his wrists to the barred enclosure that led through into the half-dozen cramped cells.

‘They’re coming at noon to listen to this fellow sing!’ lisped Stigand through his slack, blubbery lips. He kicked the prisoner, who had sunk exhausted to the floor, and received a heavy clout across his head from Gwyn.

‘Leave the man alone, you evil sod!’ snapped the big man. ‘Give him some water and a couple of crusts.’

As he left, Gwyn wondered briefly why he should be at all solicitous to a man they were shortly going to torture, then hang in a few days, but there was something about the hopeless captive that reminded him of a beaten dog.

When the cathedral bell announced the middle of the day, a small crowd assembled in the undercroft to view the proceedings. The reluctant sheriff was there, as was the coroner, his officer and clerk, the constable, and the Archdeacon of Exeter. Sergeant Gabriel, who had returned from his fruitless search in the west, was in charge of a trio of men-at-arms brought to handle the prisoner. Now partly recovered from his trek across the countryside behind Gwyn’s horse, Simon was dragged to the centre of the large space, struggling and mouthing obscenities. Two soldiers manhandled him to the ground and shackled his outstretched arms and legs to rusty rings set in stones in the damp earthen floor.

As the sheriff stood aloof, with his arms folded under his bright green mantle, John de Wolfe took over the proceedings. Though he was no keen advocate of torture, it was part of the judicial process, and with Nesta’s freedom at stake he had no compunction in applying it to this evil man.

‘Simon, you have a last chance to tell the truth. You are well aware that as a captured outlaw, your life is already forfeit, so you have nothing to gain by being obstinate.’

All John got for his words was a further stream of curses and denials, so he nodded at the gaoler, who stood by expectantly. Stigand bent with difficulty over his fat belly and lifted a metal plate, clutching it to his stained leather apron as he turned to the prisoner, crucified on the floor. With much puffing, he bent and placed the slab of iron on Simon’s chest. His breathing restricted, the man began to wheeze, and his curses became muffled as he ran short of air.

‘Speak now and ease your suffering!’ pleaded John de Alençon, making the sign of the cross in the air over the man.

Laboriously, the gaoler lowered another plate, this time on the man’s belly, preventing him from using his stomach muscles to draw in air. His oaths and obscenities became mere gasps and his face began to turn purple.

‘Speak, man, you have nothing to lose!’ shouted de Wolfe, as the outlaw’s lips became almost black. ‘Nod your head if you submit!’

As Stigand puffed over with yet another plate ready to load on to the man’s chest, Simon’s stubborn wilfulness cracked. Blood spots had begun to appear in the whites of his eyes.

‘Relieve him, before he dies on us!’

Somewhat reluctantly, the sadistic gaoler pushed the plates from the sufferer’s chest and belly, then took a leather bucket filled with dirty water and threw it over him. A few moments later, after his ravaged face had returned almost to its normal colour, Simon Claver began to speak, still pinioned to the floor. He now admitted everything, his jealousy at Gervase having the best part of the chapman’s loot, his following him to Exeter, finding him in the Bush and cutting his throat.

‘I didn’t mean to kill him,’ he croaked. ‘But as I was pulling that golden box from his pack, he started to wake and I panicked!’

Leaving Thomas to crouch down and write the confession as a record for his inquest rolls, de Wolfe went across to his brother-in-law and confronted him.

‘Satisfied now, Richard? You arrested my woman out of sheer spite, damn you! You’ve heard the confession from this man, so I hope you’ll not only order her immediate release, but go and give her a personal apology. Then I may not need to write every aspect of the matter in my presentment to the royal justices when they next come to Exeter!’

Richard began to huff and puff, but he knew that he was beaten, and after a few more heated words, he turned on his heel and marched stiffly up the steps out of the undercroft.

‘And good riddance, I say,’ muttered Gwyn in his master’s ear, as they watched the sheriff vanish. Suddenly, there was a commotion behind them and the voice of Thomas squeaked above the hubbub.

‘He’s having a fit! What’s wrong with him?’

They turned and hurried over to the group around the staked-out prisoner. Simon’s back was arched and his arms and legs jerked spasmodically, rattling the chains that held him. As John dropped on to his knees beside him, he saw that the man’s eyes had rolled up so that only the whites were showing, then there was a final great convulsion and he sank down, immobile.

‘He’s bloody well dead!’ boomed Gwyn, in a voice that expressed more incredulity than concern. ‘Why should he corpse himself now, and not when he was being squeezed?’

Thomas de Peyne looked up, his face paler than usual as he crossed himself.

‘The fool must have handled the relic-it’s Barzak’s curse once again.’ His troubled eyes rested on his master. ‘Crowner, for the Blessed Virgin’s sake, don’t open that tube, whatever you do!’

During the following week, life gradually returned to normal for the coroner’s team and the folk at the Bush. Nesta seemed none the worse for her sojourn in Rougemont, though climbing into the tavern’s darkened loft at night made her uneasy for a while. The sheriff remained distant and aloof, never referring to the matter again in John’s presence. His sister was as surly and resentful as ever with her husband, ignoring his halting thanks for keeping Nesta out of Stigand’s clutches.

The matter of the tainted relic still had to be settled. After John had taken it from Simon Claver, he had left it on the ledge in his chamber in the gatehouse, where Gwyn kept his bread and cheese. Though still sceptical about Barzak’s curse, he thought it as well to humour Thomas’s concerns and leave the tube unopened.

After a day or two, he decided to give the thing to John de Alençon to dispose of as he thought fit. The archdeacon seemed to take a more serious view of the relic’s powers, and at a meeting of the cathedral chapter, following which Bishop Marshal granted his consent, it was decided to offer it free to Glastonbury Abbey. This venerable church always seemed keen to collect relics and the pilgrims that they attracted. Letters were exchanged with the abbot, but the generous offer was gracefully declined. It seemed that Glastonbury was equally aware of the sinister history of the relic and decided not to risk taking a viper to its bosom. More letters passed across the country and eventually a home was found for the suspect relic at Tewkesbury Abbey, whose abbott apparently considered the holiness of his institution more than a match for an ancient curse.

John de Alençon could not resist a sigh of relief when he watched the gilded box and its sinister contents vanish into the scrip of a pilgrim travelling to St Cuthbert’s shrine at Lindisfarne, who had promised to deliver it to Tewkesbury en route.

He said as much to his friend the coroner, as they sat over a jug of Anjou red that evening.

‘Let’s hope they hide it away securely,’ replied John de Wolfe sombrely. ‘I’d hate to think that some other poor devil reawakens Barzak’s curse.’

‘Amen to that!’ replied the archdeacon, raising the cup to his lips.