A Plague of Heretics (Crowner John Mysteries)

by Bernard Knight

  When he awoke, to his surprise it was getting dark and he could hear his wife’s voice berating Lucille about some offence against her hair or her dress. There was a narrow slit in the wall between the solar and the hall, high up to the side of the stone chimney-piece, which allowed a restricted view downwards and some sound, when the voices were shrill enough. He gathered that she was being got ready for yet another foray to praise the Lord at her favourite church in Fore Street. Shaking himself fully awake, he called softly to the dog and slipped out of the house, grabbing his cloak as he went, for there was a chill wind outside.

  He made his usual journey down to the Bush and spent a pleasant couple of hours talking to Gwyn, Martha and a few drinking friends who were regulars at the alehouse. Some had been old soldiers, and John liked nothing better than to relive past campaigns in Ireland and France with them. Even Edwin forgot his religious mania for a time, to join in with reminiscences about the battle of Wexford, where he had lost his eye and damaged his foot.

  Outside, a chill east wind had come up, but the taproom of the Bush was warm and snug, the atmosphere being a heady mix of woodsmoke, spilled ale and unwashed bodies. Martha brought him a trencher bearing a pork knuckle, with a side dish of fried onions, and after he had chewed off the succulent meat, he dropped the bony joint on to the rushes under the table, where Brutus slavered over it for the next hour.

  This convivial evening was suddenly disturbed by a man bursting in through the front door, a familiar figure to John and Gwyn. It was the beanpole shape of Osric, one of the constables, obviously in a state of agitation as he stared around in the flickering light from the fire and the few rushlights on their sconces.

  ‘Crowner, there you are!’ he cried. ‘There’s a fire started in Milk Lane. You’d better come quickly!’

  De Wolfe jumped up at once, as did Gwyn and a number of the other men. Fires in the city were a very serious matter, as many a town had been razed to the ground from a single house going ablaze. Part of the coroner’s remit, irrespective of whether there were deaths, was to hold inquests into fires with a view to trying to prevent similar ones in the future.

  The men hurried out, jostling through the door after the coroner, and began jogging to the end of Idle Lane, then up Smythen Street towards The Shambles. Darkness had fallen several hours earlier, and the pulsating glow from the fire was plainly visible over the roofs to the left. Before they reached The Shambles, Milk Lane branched off to the left, meeting Fore Street just above St Olave’s Church on the other side.

  As they ran, Osric was alongside John and panted out what he knew of the conflagration. ‘It’s in one of the dairy houses, halfway along. Thank God they are well spaced out because of the beasts, so there’s less likelihood of the fire spreading!’

  Milk Lane was named after the half-dozen cottages that kept cows and goats in their large yards, the tenants – or usually their wives – milking the animals and selling dairy products around the city streets. The beasts were fed with hay and cut grass and often taken on halters down to Bull Mead or Exe Island to crop the grass on the common land.

  As they reached the corner, they saw a low dwelling well ablaze, with a crowd of people outside doing what they could to quell the flames. There was little water available, other than what could be carried in wooden and leather buckets from a couple of wells, but half a dozen men were dragging down the blazing thatch with long rakes.

  As they hurried up to the cottage, Gwyn looked up at the sparks and shreds of burning straw that were flying into the lane.

  ‘This damned wind is making it worse!’ he shouted. ‘Better if those men threw some water on to the thatch of the houses opposite. It’s too late to save this one.’

  Osric raced off on his long legs to divert some of the men with buckets, while John and his officer ran into the garden, keeping upwind of the flying embers. Cattle were lowing and goats bleated in fright, but those belonging to the burning house had been taken out into adjacent yards to keep them safe.

  ‘Is there anyone inside?’ he shouted to one of the neighbours labouring to pull off the burning straw.

  The man, his hair singed and face blackened, came up close. ‘It seems so, but we can’t get near enough to get in until this thatch is taken down!’

  He was right, as over the front door, the only entrance, a cascade of flame dripped down from the low roof.

  ‘I’ll try a window,’ boomed Gwyn and lumbered off around the back, dodging sparks and handfuls of burning straw. He saw that a low shed, used as a dairy, projected from the back wall, but it had no door and was well alight. In each side wall of the cottage was a small window opening, firmly blocked by heavy shutters barred on the inside. John came after him with another man, and they cast around for some way to get into the building.

  ‘Use this as a ram!’ hollered de Wolfe, pointing to the ground. A stout feeding trough, made of long planks nailed together, lay on the earth. In a moment he and Gwyn had lifted it up and smashed one end against the shutters on the nearest window. These were strong and the bar inside must have been even stronger, but half a dozen blows shattered both the trough and the window frame. Gwyn tore at the splintered wood with his big hands and pulled the whole structure down on to the ground. He stuck his head into the ragged aperture, but withdrew it instantly, coughing and gasping, his eyes running with tears as a blast of hot, suffocating air rushed out to meet him.

  John pulled him out of the way and shoved him back to recover his breath, while he grabbed an empty oat-bag that was lying on the ground nearby.

  ‘Bring that bucket here!’ he yelled to a man who was bringing water to throw on the fallen thatch. Dipping the coarse cloth in the bucket, he wrapped it around his head, with only a slit for his eyes, and advanced on the window. The burning straw above gave plenty of light, and in the moment before his eyes filled with tears he glimpsed several bodies lying inert on the floor inside.

  Forced to draw back, he grabbed Gwyn’s arm as he pulled off the soaking bag.

  ‘There are people in there – at least one is a child!’ he gasped. ‘We must get in straight away!’

  Two other men heard him and instantly set about knocking down the house wall. The window was set between two oak uprights that stretched from ground to eaves, the wall below being made of cob, a mixture of lime, mud and straw plastered on to a framework of woven wattle. The men ran to the front gate and rocked out one of the posts, a length of tree trunk the thickness of a man’s thigh. Using this as a heavier battering ram than the trough, they rapidly smashed the brittle wall from between its supports, making a doorway out of the window.

  Gwyn, the ends of his red hair and moustache singed from his earlier attempt, was first through, and he dashed in and grabbed the smallest body from the floor. A rain of burning and smouldering thatch floated down on him, but the main structure of rough rafters and hazel-withies was still intact, though beginning to burn through. As he came out with the inert little body, John and three more neighbours ran in and took out a larger child, then struggled out with two adults.

  All were laid on the earth well away from the burning cottage, immediately surrounded by a ring of concerned men and women.

  A quick examination in the flickering light soon confirmed the worst – all were undoubtedly dead. The wives began sobbing and wailing, especially over the pathetic bodies of the two children, a boy of about three and a girl of four years.

  ‘They haven’t been burned to death, thank God,’ muttered Gwyn, trying to wrest some comfort from the tragedy. ‘Look, they have no burns worth talking about, apart from what’s fallen on them from bits of roof straw.’

  John, saddened as much as any of them, nodded. Experience had taught them the signs of fatal burning, thankfully absent in these bodies.

  ‘Look at the faces of the mother and father,’ he murmured to one of the rescuers. ‘Pink, that’s what they get when they breathe in these noxious fumes.’

  He stepped back and turned to the shocked
neighbours, all the wives – and some of the men – openly crying at the tragedy. ‘These are the folk who lived here?’ he asked, just to officially confirm who they were.

  A grizzled man wearing a smith’s apron nodded. ‘I live next door to them. My wife also keeps a couple of cows. These did the same, though Algar was a fuller, just as I am an ironworker in Smythen Street.’

  John stared at him. ‘Algar the fuller? This is the man?’ He pointed down and then bent to get a better look at the face in the poor light, as the flames were now dying as all the thatch was pulled down.

  ‘Yes, that’s Algar, God rest his soul, even if he did have some strange ideas.’

  ‘The same Algar who was hauled up before the cathedral canons last week?’ persisted John.

  The smith looked at him suspiciously. ‘Do you think there’s some connection, then?’

  De Wolfe rubbed some smuts from his eyes. ‘I don’t know, but I’m damned well going to find out!’ he said grimly.

  The inquest held next day was different from almost all the others that John de Wolfe had held in Exeter. This was mainly because of the size and mood of the crowd who attended. Usually, it consisted of a dozen or a score of reluctant jurymen, plus the immediate family, unlike in the countryside, where the whole village turned out to watch and listen.

  On this Monday afternoon, well over a hundred people gathered in the churchyard of St Bartholomew’s. This was the nearest available burial ground to Milk Lane, as the canons had denied burial of a self-confessed heretic in the cathedral cemetery in the Close. This in itself had angered many townsfolk, given the tragic circumstances of the four deaths, especially of two children and their mother.

  The little church, in whose yard the mound of soil was still fresh over the plague pit, also had a crude mortuary, an open lean-to shed built against one wall, where the corpses had lain overnight. The coroner and his officer arrived and were surprised by the large crowd who had assembled – and by the sight of none other than Thomas de Peyne, complete with his writing pouch, ready to record the inquest.

  ‘You should be in bed!’ protested de Wolfe. ‘What are you doing here?’

  The clerk was unrepentant. ‘I am almost completely recovered, Crowner,’ he said firmly. ‘This awful event needs a proper record made, and you said yourself that the sheriff’s man was not satisfactory.’

  Grudgingly, but with some concealed admiration, John muttered that as he was now there he might as well make himself useful. Gwyn fussed around getting him a stool from the church and a box to set his parchments on, then they got on with the proceedings.

  The sheriff appeared, another unusual event, together with Ralph Morin and Brother Rufus from the castle.

  It was noticeable that no one from the cathedral was present and that the only cleric, apart from Rufus and Thomas, was the incumbent of St Bartholomew’s.

  The horror of the fire also brought out the two portreeves, Hugh de Relaga and Henry Rifford, as well as a number of the burgesses. The reason for this unusual interest was made obvious when, as soon as Gwyn had bellowed out the official call to order, the coroner began the proceedings.

  ‘This is an inquest into both the cause of the fire itself and the causes of death of the four victims,’ he boomed, standing up on an old grave-mound with his back to the wall of the church. ‘Such verdicts are usually of accident, but in this instance I have no doubt that you, the jurymen here assembled, will find that it was murder!’

  A rumble of anger, shock and dismay passed like a wave over the deep half-circle of faces ranged before him, even though many either knew or suspected the fact already.

  ‘We must enquire into the deaths of Algar, a fuller of Milk Lane, together with Margaret his wife and his children, Peter and Mabel.’

  The jury, eighteen men who had been at the scene the previous night, were ranged in the front of the crowd. They stared at this tall, dark man with an intensity driven by the anger in their hearts, and hung on his every word.

  ‘As you well know, myself, my officer and the city constables were at this conflagration last evening and we were there again this morning. We found certain evidence that makes it certain that this was no accident!’

  His voice was harsh as he made it carry over the crowd, and they responded by a low growl of anger at what he was telling them.

  ‘Firstly, in spite of the damage by fire, we found a baulk of wood the length of my leg, jamming the only door, so that it could not be opened from the inside.’

  He waved at Gwyn, who came to his side bearing a scorched length of timber, as thick as an arm. The coroner grabbed it and waved it in the air. ‘The bottom of this was set in a crack in the stones of the path so it could not slip, and the upper end was jammed under the middle cross-member of the door. It could not possibly have got there by any other means than deliberate malice.’

  He handed the wood to the nearest juryman, who looked at it and passed it along to his companions.

  ‘When I entered the burning house to help retrieve the victims, there was a definite smell of naphtha, and this can be confirmed by Gwyn of Polruan, Osric the constable and several of you jurymen.’

  He paused and Gwyn again handed him something.

  ‘This morning, when we searched the yard, we found this earthen jar against the fence.’

  De Wolfe brandished a rough pottery flask of about a quart capacity above his head. ‘It smells strongly of naphtha, and there were a few drops of an oily liquid smelling strongly of that fiery substance still inside.’

  Naphtha was a distillate imported from the Levant, an ingredient of ‘Greek Fire’, a highly inflammable substance used in grenades and naval warfare. John passed the jar to the jury, who sniffed it and muttered over it as it went along the line. But he had not yet finished with his indictment.

  ‘Inside the cottage, when we were able to enter it this morning, were the broken remains of yet another flask, lying in a corner.’ Gwyn provided a small wooden bucket, inside which were some shattered shards of a finely made pottery flask with a narrow neck still intact.

  ‘This can only be a container for brandy-wine, an expensive concoction from France, which has much pure liquor in it and is very easy to ignite.’

  He beckoned to the next-door neighbour, whom he had designated to be the foreman of the jury, and handed him the bucket. ‘Tell me, from your close knowledge of Algar, was he likely to have brandy-wine in his house?’

  The tone of his voice suggested the answer he wished to receive, but the man had no need of prompting.

  ‘By God’s truth, sir, not at all!’ he said firmly. ‘Algar was an abstemious man and also without any riches to spend on liquors. What they drank in that house was weak ale and good milk!’

  The dramatic part of the inquest was over, but for form’s sake John called several of the neighbours to describe the suddenness of the fire late at night and the rapid conflagration of the straw roof, which made any approach to the front door impossible.

  ‘I think that incendiary stuff was thrown up over the front of the thatch. That broken flask must have fallen through when the roof came down later,’ claimed the foreman harshly.

  ‘Would most folk in Milk Lane be in their beds at the time the fire started?’ asked John.

  ‘Indeed so, sir! We are all milking people, with work to do before dawn, so we get abed very early. That is why the fire was so well ablaze before anyone noticed last night, as we were all asleep ourselves.’

  There was no more relevant evidence, and the growling crowd had little need of anything further. John had one last order to make, a poignant and pathetic one.

  ‘It is part of the king’s law that the inquest must include a viewing of the cadavers by the jury. However painful this must be to you men who knew this family as neighbours and friends, you must see the bodies and confirm who they are and observe any wounds or other significant appearances. You will see that though there are numerous surface burns, there are no other injuries and that the skin
of the victims is pink, showing that they drew down noxious gases into their lights before dying. This may be some consolation, as this can obliterate their wits and render them virtually dead before the fire reaches them.’

  With a mixture of reluctance and suppressed wrath, the jury filed past a handcart which Gwyn pushed out of the mortuary shed. On it were four still figures, shrouded in clean linen, the wrappings turned back to expose the faces.

  The man lay next to this wife, and nestled in the crook of each of her arms were her children. All the faces were tinted pink like ripe cherries, together with scattered burns from fallen thatch. There were sobs from some of the men and outright wailing from women in the crowd, who had a more distant view of the pathetic remains on the handcart.

  De Wolfe watched impassively as the men returned to their places before him, though there was cold fury in his own heart at this atrocity. He scanned the crowd as he waited, identifying those from the castle and Guildhall – and was surprised to see Matilda at the back, attended by Lucille and Cecilia. At dinner he had told her briefly of the calamity and the findings of incendiary devices and the blocked door. She had listened in silence, but he sensed that it was not the silence of her usual indifference, but from horror and dismay. He had not known that she intended to come to the inquest, but there she was at the rear of the crowd, along with so many others who had come because of the killing of two innocent children and their mother.

  When the last juryman had shuffled into place, John’s deep voice again boomed out over the crowded churchyard.

  ‘The duty of a coroner is to determine who, where, when and by what means persons came to their deaths – and where necessary to send any persons suspected of causing those deaths to the king’s justices for trial.’

  He paused and glared around as if to deny any contradiction.

  ‘The first four of those tasks is not difficult in this instance. We well know who the victims are, we know where and when they died and we know they died from the effects of fire. As to who caused their deaths, at this stage that remains unknown, except to God himself.’