A Plague of Heretics (Crowner John Mysteries)

by Bernard Knight

  John sighed. He had come across this warped imagination of witnesses before. ‘But nothing definite? The same person being seen by two different people, for instance?’

  Osric shook his head. ‘As that neighbour told us, they go to their beds early there, with the morning milking to do. It’s a side street; not many people use it unless they come to buy butter, cheese or milk, and that’s in the daytime.’

  Theobald put in a sensible question. ‘Where would anyone get this naphtha stuff, Crowner? I’d only heard of it as something used in warfare. Would it have to be a soldier of some sort?’

  The coroner shrugged. ‘I know little about it myself. I heard of it being used at the siege of Constantinople, as an ingredient in this Greek Fire they shot from catapults. But who in Devon would possess it, God alone knows.’

  ‘We’ll keep asking around for this Alan de Bere, sir,’ promised Osric. ‘He must be hiding somewhere, unless he’s already left the city.’

  ‘I’ll question all the gatekeepers,’ offered Theobald. ‘But most are so blind or so stupid that they’d not notice if an elephant passed through!’

  On this pessimistic note, John left and went back to his chamber at Rougemont, where Gwyn had news of a serious assault in Polsloe, a mile north-east of the city.

  ‘The Serjeant of the Hundred rode in to say that a woman there had been robbed, ravished and beaten. She’s been taken into the priory in danger of her life.’

  ‘Have they caught the assailant?’ demanded de Wolfe, already sickened by the increase in violence lately.

  ‘The hue and cry was raised and they seized two men. They’re locked in a cowshed waiting for you, with half the men of the village eager to hang them from the nearest tree.’

  ‘People are too damned ready to hang anyone they dislike,’ grumbled the coroner. ‘What do they think the king’s courts are for?’

  Gwyn had his own opinion on that, but he kept his thoughts to himself.

  An hour later they rode into Polsloe, a village which had a small house of Benedictine nuns nearby. John knew it well, not least because it was where Matilda had taken refuge twice, though she never stayed long enough to take her vows. They were met at the edge of the hamlet by the Serjeant of Cliston Hundred and the manor-reeve, who took them to the small barn where a couple of angry villagers were guarding two men locked inside.

  ‘Who are they?’ asked John, peering through a crack in the rough planking at the pair of ruffians sitting disconsolately on the floor, already feeling the gallows rope around their necks.

  ‘Strangers, passing through,’ answered the serjeant, a tall, muscular man named Thomas Sanguin, who was responsible for upholding the law in his Hundred, a subdivision of the county. ‘One claims his name is Martin of Nailsea, the other just David the Welshman. Both say they are ship-men, stranded at Exmouth and walking back to Bristol.’

  ‘Have they confessed?’ asked Gwyn.

  ‘No, have they hell! They deny everything, though they were seen running away from the woman’s house.’

  ‘Any stolen goods on them?’

  Sanguin shook his head. ‘She had nothing to steal. A young widow, living on the parish, so they beat her and ravished her for spite, the swine!’

  ‘Will she die?’ asked John.

  ‘Best ask the nuns at the priory; they are caring for her. But the poor woman is beaten badly.’

  John scratched his head as an aid to thought. Where victims were badly injured, they could be given into the care of the assailant, who would usually do all he could to keep them alive, for if they died within a year and a day of the assault, he would be tried for murder. However, a couple of rascally sailors were unlikely to be of much use to the poor woman, compared with the care she was getting at the nunnery, which was well known for its expertise in dealing with childbirth and women’s ailments.

  ‘Get them sent into the city. They can be housed at the South Gate gaol. The sheriff can decide what to do about them, depending on whether the woman lives or dies. I’d better go down to the priory to make enquiries.’

  He and Gwyn went to the woman’s cottage on the way, a desperately poor place, where he was told that the woman eked out an existence after her husband died of poisoning of the blood caught from an injury in the fields with a hayfork that stabbed his foot. The single room was so barely furnished that it was hard to tell if an assault had taken place there, apart from the bloodstains on the pile of rags that was her bed.

  ‘Better keep those to show at the court, if it ever gets that far,’ said John to the serjeant. ‘Now I’ll go to see the woman – or at least talk to the nuns about her.’

  The nunnery was in a compound behind a stone wall, with a gatehouse guarded by a porter. John knew the place well, not only from visits concerning his wife, but from several cases concerning women, where Dame Madge, a formidable nun who acted as the sub-prioress, had been of great help to him in matters of rape and abortion.

  Leaving Gwyn at the gatehouse with the horses, he sought out Dame Madge and she came to the steps of the main range of buildings to meet him.

  ‘The woman is too ill to talk to you, Sir John,’ she announced firmly. A tall, stooped woman with a gaunt face, she was almost a female version of John himself, a humourless, no-nonsense person who spoke her mind and whose honesty was beyond question. He did not even attempt to persuade her to let him see the victim, but accepted her word.

  ‘Has she been ravished?’ he asked.

  ‘Undoubtedly and repeatedly,’ replied the grim-featured nun. ‘She has been damaged in her woman’s parts, as well as beaten sorely about the head and face. Her wits are disordered at the moment, but no doubt they will return.’

  ‘She will recover, then?’

  Dame Madge nodded. ‘She is young and strong and her body will heal up. I am not so sure about her mind, after such an ordeal from those swine.’

  ‘They will pay for it, never fear, lady. I will see to it myself He sighed and shook his head at the amount of evil in the world.

  Though sequestered in a priory, the nuns were always avid for news of the outside world, and he told the old sister of the evil calamity in the city two nights earlier. She crossed herself and murmured a prayer for the dead children and their mother.

  ‘There are sinful people about, Sir John. Though I cannot condone heresy, which eats at the fabric of our Mother Church, no one can approve of such random and vicious cruelty.’

  ‘It seems to have affected my wife very much,’ said John. ‘Though she was very active in a campaign to rid the city of these heretics, since these deaths she seems to have turned in on herself and has become silent and morose.’

  Dame Madge gave him a sudden sweet smile. ‘Your wife is a strange woman, Crowner! We have had ample opportunity here to get to know her, from her two fruitless attempts to take the veil. I think she despairs of life, since her brother fell from grace – and you have not helped at all, sir, with your absences and your amorous adventures!’

  De Wolfe nodded sadly. ‘We should never have married, sister. It was not of our doing – we were pushed together by our parents.’

  The dame nodded but was unforgiving. ‘What the Lord has joined together, let no man break asunder, even until death itself.’

  With this uncompromising finale, de Wolfe left the priory, with an assurance that the nuns would let him know when the woman was fit enough to be questioned. He rode back to the East Gate in silence, Gwyn knowing him well enough not to intrude on his bleak mood. At Rougemont, they returned the horses they had borrowed from the castle stables, and John went to bring the sheriff up to date on events. When he had told him of the latest crime in Polsloe and of the failure to make any headway with the Milk Lane fire, he went back to Martin’s Lane and waited for his dinner. Matilda was up in her solar at the back of the house, so John went to sit in Mary’s kitchen-hut in the yard, drinking ale and watching her gut some fish that she was going to spit-roast over the fire that burned red in its pit in the middle
of the floor. She was a brisk, competent woman, and John was always impressed by the variety of good food that she managed to produce with such primitive facilities.

  As she worked, he told her of the morning’s visit to Polsloe, and as usual she was angrily sympathetic to the victim’s plight.

  ‘You men are such evil creatures!’ she complained. ‘Look at the harm that has been done to women and children in the space of a few days. You treat animals better than that!’

  Few would let a maid speak to them so frankly, but John and Mary understood each other far beyond the usual relationship of master to servant. He cocked his head upwards towards the solar stairs.

  ‘What mood is your mistress in today?’ he asked. ‘She seems oddly subdued since yesterday, hardly bothering to abuse me!’

  Mary nodded as she slid long skewers through the herrings to place across the forked supports over the fire. ‘There’s something bothering her, that’s for sure. But her tongue is recovering, for I heard her shouting at Lucille not long ago.’

  The wraith-like French maid lived in abject subjection to Matilda’s bad temper. Recently, when her mistress had gone into retreat in the priory, Lucille had been farmed out to Eleanor de Revelle, but when John’s wife had returned to the house she was reclaimed, as if she was some piece of furniture.

  John sat drinking for a while, watching the cook adding herbs to an iron pot of hare stew at the edge of the fire and peeling onions to go with the fish. Suddenly, she looked up.

  ‘I hear the solar door opening. You had better make yourself scarce,’ she warned.

  John took the hint, as Matilda frowned upon his fraternising with the lower classes – especially as she had a shrewd suspicion that in the past John had known Mary a little too well, in the biblical sense. Taking his jug of ale, he slid out of the hut, which faced away from the solar, and hurried around the house, through the covered passage that led to the vestibule.

  When she lumbered into the hall, her husband was sitting by the fire, fondling his hound’s ears. She looked at him suspiciously but said nothing as she made her way to her usual seat, the hooded monks’ chair on the other side of the hearth.

  From long practice, John was sensitive to her moods and detected that her recent preoccupied depression was now giving way to suppressed anger. She glared across at him as he sat with his ale-pot in his hand.

  ‘Are you not going to get me something to drink?’ she snapped, her small eyes dark and penetrating.

  Relieved that at least she was speaking to him now, John went to the table, where he kept his wines, and filled a pewter cup from a skin of Anjou red. As he handed it to her, he took advantage of the slight thaw in her mood to tell her about the attack in Polsloe. ‘I went to the priory to see the poor woman, but Dame Madge told me she was too ill. She asked after your health, by the way.’

  Matilda grabbed the cup and swallowed half the contents in one draught. ‘I suppose that old crone slandered me, telling you what a difficult woman I was when I was there!’ she said bitterly.

  ‘She did no such thing,’ retorted John indignantly, annoyed by his wife’s lack of charity in ignoring the plight of the ravished woman.

  ‘The world is full of evil people,’ she muttered obscurely, slipping back into silence until Mary came in some time later to set the table for their dinner. Most households ate directly off the scrubbed boards of their tables, but Matilda had long insisted on wooden or pewter platters to hold the bread trenchers and bowls for potage and stews. When the carrot and herb soup and the grilled herrings were finished, the cook-maid brought a dish of diced fat pork with winter-sweetened parsnips.

  The pair champed their way through the courses in surly silence, until Matilda suddenly grunted and fished inside her mouth.

  ‘That useless woman – she could have broken my teeth!’ she snapped, throwing a small piece of bone down on the table.

  John tried to be conciliatory, though he knew that his wife seized on every chance to denigrate Mary. ‘We should build a better cook-shed for her,’ he suggested mildly. ‘It’s very difficult for her to prepare food properly in that tiny place, where she has to live and work.’

  Matilda took instant exception to his innocent remark. ‘You contradict me at every turn, John!’ she flared. ‘You always defend the woman – and don’t think I don’t know why! No doubt you employ your lechery on her at every opportunity. Lucille is not blind, you know; she sees plenty from that room of hers!’

  The injustice of this accusation melted John’s restraint like the sun on morning frost, especially as he had not laid a lecherous finger on their cook-maid for several years.

  ‘You see adultery and fornication in every breath I take, woman!’ he shouted across the table. ‘For the sake of St Peter and all his angels, why did you not stay in that damned nunnery and not inflict yourself upon me?’

  For answer, she grabbed her platter, which still had some pork gravy on it, and threw it across the table at him. It hit him on the shoulder, and a greasy mess slid down the front of his grey tunic. His quick temper was instantly ignited and he leaped up to yell imprecations at her, while she for her part launched into a screaming diatribe about the years of shame and humiliation she had had to bear from him. It was a familiar pattern for their differences, though the intensity was extreme. Even in the midst of this torrid exchange, John managed to feel a morsel of relief that her former abstracted mood had reverted to something more familiar.

  At the height of their abusive exchange, a pale, frightened face appeared around the hall door as Lucille peered in, having heard her mistress’s voice from her den in the yard. Fearing that she might miss a summons and all the castigation that would follow, she peered in to enquire if she was required – but before she could open her mouth, John spotted her and roared at her.

  ‘Get out of here, you damned spy and carrier of tales!’ he yelled and threw an empty wooden salt-pot at her. It bounced off the draught-screens inside the door but had the desired effect as Lucille’s head vanished abruptly and the door slammed shut.

  ‘You not only persecute me, but my poor maid as well,’ screeched his wife, ignoring the fact that she made the ‘poor’ maid’s life a misery with her endless demands and scoldings. However, the interruption had dampened their ardour for fighting, and Matilda marched out imperiously, heading for her solar, where she no doubt would continue to harass Lucille. John slumped back into his chair, emotionally drained once more. He wondered how his life could go on like this, but as the anger receded so the problems that beset him began to flood back into his mind. His brother – how was he? He must get down there again very soon, as he had a permanent fear of the manor-reeve riding into Exeter to tell him that William was no more.

  Almost guiltily, he again realised that no progress had been made at all on any of the murders of the past week or two. Most killings, certainly in the countryside that contained the majority of England’s population, were either solved almost instantly or never solved at all!

  If a house were robbed and someone attacked, then in a village everyone knew within minutes who had done it, except in the rarer cases of some stranger passing through, as at Polsloe. But even there the sharp eyes of nosy old men and curious goodwives usually spotted something unusual happening.

  Even in towns and cities, each parish or district had a village attitude and often knew exactly what was going on from moment to moment. It was the casual killings, the robberies with violence by outlaws on lonely roads or the gangs that sometimes came marauding through hamlets that left the rudimentary law-enforcement system paralysed. John felt that lately he had had more of his share of unsolvable crimes.

  If he felt guilt about failing to solve a single murder, he had more of the same emotion concerning Hilda, who he felt he was neglecting with all the problems circling around him. He recalled that he had lost his former lover, Nesta, partly because his preoccupation with his duties had led her to feel shut out from a large part of his life.

&nbs
p; But soon his common sense pulled him back to earth, and with a muttered curse at the world in general he hauled himself to his feet and went around to the yard to find Mary. After all, he consoled himself, it was just another row with his wife, one of hundreds over the years, though he could not recall her ever throwing a platter at him before. He went into the kitchen-shed to get Mary to swab off the mess on his tunic with hot water and a rag. She did so, clucking her disapproval at the spoiling of a good linen garment.

  ‘Lucille told me there was a fine row going on,’ she said severely, ‘but I could hear it from here – this household goes from bad to worse!’

  ‘I think she’s going mad,’ said John gloomily as Mary rubbed at his shoulder. ‘She wallows in self-pity and doesn’t have a good word for anybody or anything – except that bloody church of hers.’

  He went back to the vestibule and threw on his cloak to hide the wet patch on his tunic, then went out into the lane. At a loss for a moment as to what to do next, he turned towards the High Street, deciding to go back to Rougemont. At the corner he saw the massive figure of Gwyn coming towards him, ploughing through the crowd like a ship breasting a choppy sea.

  ‘Crowner, I think I’ve found the bastard!’ he bellowed from several yards away.

  ‘Found who?’ demanded John as his officer came close.

  ‘Alan de Bere! Gabriel says one of his men-at-arms swears he saw him this morning coming out of one of those ramshackle huts on Exe Island. Shall we see if we can find him?’

  They hurried down to Carfoix and then down the steep slope of Fore Street to the West Gate. Outside, the river ran sluggishly past, separated from the city walls by a wide area of grassy swamp and mud, crisscrossed by leats and ditches. This was Exe Island, sometimes flooded when there was a cloudburst up on distant Exmoor, though a number of poor wooden houses and shacks dotted its unstable surface. Near the walls, a row of slightly better dwellings formed Frog Lane, and at the northern end, where the river bent around, there were fulling mills and other small factories belonging to the thriving cloth trade.