A Plague of Heretics (Crowner John Mysteries)

by Bernard Knight

  ‘Nor am I, so let’s find out!’ growled Ralph.

  They trotted down the hill and along the High Street and when they reached the corner of Martin’s Lane they heard and saw a crowd of people milling around outside the two houses that stood side by side opposite the livery stables.

  ‘Gwyn, go to the sheriffs house and drag him out,’ commanded Morin. ‘Tell him what you know and bring him back here as fast as you can.’

  With John and Rufus at his side, Ralph pushed his way through the throng, where Osric and Theobald, the city constables, were trying to organise a hue and cry from the disorderly crowd. Inside Clement’s hall, a couple of local matrons were bending over the young maid, who was still unconscious.

  ‘She’s had a bad blow on the head, poor lamb,’ said one. ‘We’ve sent for Richard Lustcote the apothecary, but I think she should be taken to the monks at St John’s.’

  A few candles had now been lit, and John, who suddenly became a coroner once more, suspected that by the look of the large bruise on her jaw, the girl had been punched in the face and had then fallen backwards, striking her head.

  There was cry from outside the back door, and de Wolfe recognised Mary’s voice. He hurried out ahead of Morin and the monk, to see his cook-maid sitting on the earth in the gloom, still cradling the head and shoulders of Cecilia of Salisbury.

  ‘She has been throttled, John!’ said Mary, forgetting the ‘Sir’ in her agitation. ‘But she seems in no danger, though her voice has almost gone. But she managed to tell me that she cannot remember anything since he attacked her.’

  ‘He? Who’s he?’ demanded John, almost demented with mixed rage and relief.

  ‘Yes, what evil bastard did this?’ bellowed Ralph Morin from behind him.

  ‘She says it was her husband,’ answered Mary in a voice choked with emotion. ‘And she said that Clement also strangled my mistress, may God curse him!’

  An hour later some order had been made out of the chaos in Martin’s Lane. The apothecary had examined both Cecilia and her maid, who was slowly showing signs of regaining her wits. Richard Lustcote decided that neither would gain anything by being carried off to St John’s Priory and that bed rest and some soothing potions would be the best treatment.

  John had sent Gwyn down to the Bush to fetch Enyd and Hilda and soon they arrived, weeping tears of relief at his sudden deliverance from the accusation of murder. His mother clutched him to her breast as if she wanted to crush him back into the womb that had borne him, while Hilda braved his black stubble to give him tender kisses of thankfulness. Once they had vented their emotion, they willingly agreed to help tend to the two victims in Cecilia’s own house.

  Instead of a solar, there was a bedroom partitioned off the hall, and here the lady of the house was gently laid on her couch. Lustcote applied some soothing balm to her bruised throat and gave her a honeyed draught to ease her battered voice-box. The maid normally slept in the warm kitchen-shed, as they had no live-in cook, so after her head wound had been cleaned and bandaged she was laid there, under the watchful eyes of a benign neighbour.

  John had looked at the damage to Cecilia’s neck while Richard Lustcote was anointing it and saw typical finger bruises and nail scratches on the skin.

  ‘Almost exactly the same as those on Matilda’s throat,’ he told Henry de Furnellis when the men were standing around the fire in his own hall next door, drinking some ale after all the commotion. A dozen neighbours and a few men-at-arms had gone off around the city streets as the hue and cry, this time looking for Clement the physician.

  ‘Why the scratches, as well as the blue bruises?’ asked Brother Rufus, who did not intend to miss any of this drama.

  ‘From fingernails,’ explained de Wolfe. ‘Usually from the victim trying to tear away the strangler’s hands.’

  ‘Why should her husband want to kill her, for Christ’s sake?’ demanded Henry de Furnellis. ‘And why kill Matilda, as she claimed?’

  John shrugged, though he badly wanted to know the answer himself. ‘When she can speak more easily, no doubt all will be made plain. In the meantime, where is that murderous bastard?’

  The sheriff for once looked optimistic, a rare mood for him. ‘We’ll get him, never fear! I’ve sent soldiers down to each of the city gates, to make sure that tonight no one goes in or out. Hopefully, not a mouse can leave the city, so he must be in here somewhere.’

  Leaving the women to look after the victims, they decided to join the hunt and, after placing a man-at-arms on the door, dispersed to join the various groups who had formed the hue and cry about the town. By now, the city grapevine had alerted almost the whole population; one of these was Thomas, who hurried up just as John and Gwyn were leaving.

  His peaky face was creased in smiles when Gwyn explained that their master was now free from suspicion, and he crossed himself repeatedly as he murmured a prayer of thanks for John’s deliverance.

  ‘We’re off to look for this damned doctor now,’ rumbled Gwyn. ‘You’re the clever one among us – where do you reckon he might be hiding?’

  ‘Have you tried the place where he holds his healing consultations?’ suggested Thomas. ‘I think it was in Goldsmith Street.’

  They hurried to the lane near the Guildhall, but found it was one of the first places that the men of the hue and cry had thought of. Theobald, the fat constable, was still standing outside the shop when they arrived.

  ‘Osric told me to keep watch in case Clement came back,’ he explained.

  ‘Came back? So was he here before?’ snapped de Wolfe.

  Theobald waved a hand at the premises behind him, which was a former cordwainer’s shop with a wooden shutter on the front which was lowered to form a display counter.

  ‘The door was open and there’s some disorder inside, bottles and pills scattered on the floor, but no sign of the doctor.’

  Thomas had a quick look inside the single room and came out nodding. ‘Looks as if he was searching for something in great haste,’ he reported.

  The coroner looked from face to face. ‘Now where do we look?’ he asked angrily. He had collected his sword from his hall and was swishing it aggressively, as if practising to lop off the head of the man who had slain his wife.

  As usual, it was Thomas who had the best suggestion. ‘The physician is a very devout man, perhaps abnormally so, by all accounts,’ he observed. ‘So perhaps he has taken himself to a church to seek absolution for his many sins?’

  ‘Perhaps he’s also seeking sanctuary!’ said Gwyn with unconscious irony, after de Wolfe’s recent manoeuvre.

  The coroner rasped a hand over his bristly cheeks as he thought of the various places Clement might have gone to.

  ‘Not the cathedral, it’s too obvious and too many people hanging about there. But what about St Olave’s; he is very friendly with that poxy priest, Julian Fulk.’

  For want of any better idea, they set off down the High Street and across Carfoix to the little church at the top of Fore Street, founded by Gytha, the Saxon mother of King Harold. Outside, de Wolfe hesitated and beckoned to his clerk.

  ‘Thomas, I can’t go storming in there with a naked sword and I’m not leaving it in the street. You’re a priest. You go in and see if there’s any sign of him.’

  He waited with Gwyn at the edge of the road, listening to the cries of other searchers lower down towards the West Gate. The fitful light of a gibbous moon appeared through a gap in the clouds and illuminated another group of men coming out of Milk Lane almost opposite, their tramping feet echoing in the night air.

  Then their attention was jerked back to the church as Thomas’s face appeared in the doorway, looking even paler than usual, given the poor light.

  ‘You’d better come in, master!’ he said in a very subdued voice. ‘Sword or no sword, this is more important.’

  John and his officer followed the clerk into the bare nave lit only by a pair of candles on the altar.

  As Thomas led them towards the chancel
step, he began intoning, ‘Domine, requiem aeternam dona eis, et lux perpetua luceat eis.’

  A moment later they saw the outline of a man spreadeagled across the step, his arms outstretched as if in supplication to the cross on the altar table. De Wolfe bent and grasped the back of his hair and lifted the head to see the face.

  It was Clement of Salisbury, his features contorted in a final grimace of agony, his mouth twisted into a rictus of pain. Smashed alongside him was a small pottery bottle, a trickle of dark liquid still seeping down a crack in the chancel step, just as the physician’s life had seeped away a short while earlier.

  Next morning the main participants assembled again in the hall of Clement’s house. Mary had brought in pastries, ale, cider and wine from her kitchen, and they sat around the large table where some time ago John and Matilda had eaten supper with the physician and his wife.

  ‘How is the young maid today?’ asked the sheriff, who sat at the head of the table.

  ‘Recovering, thank the Blessed Virgin,’ said Enyd de Wolfe, who had appointed herself chief nurse. ‘She has regained her senses but has a severe headache and her face is sore from that bruise. The apothecary, bless him, has given her a strong draught to let her sleep today.’

  ‘The poor child must have had a heavy blow to the face,’ added Hilda, who sat next to John and held his hand under cover of the table.

  ‘My husband hit her when she tried to stop him assaulting me,’ whispered Cecilia. She had insisted on leaving her bed when the others came, saying that it was her throat that was afflicted, not her legs or brain. She wore a heavy blue brocade surcoat over her nightgown, the collar turned up over a swathe of bandage that Richard Lustcote had wound around her neck to hold his poultice in place.

  ‘Don’t strain your throat, dear woman,’ advised Enyd solicitously, but Cecilia said that whispering was not a problem.

  ‘I want to expose all the facts of this terrible matter, so that no one carries any further blame,’ she breathed earnestly. ‘The fault lay entirely in this household, I fear, for my husband was quite mad, though I did not fully realise it until last night.’

  The others listened in horrified fascination as she slowly and quietly revealed the extent of Clement’s obsessions.

  ‘He did not move to Exeter to set up a better physician’s practice,’ she said. ‘We were forced to leave Salisbury because of his behaviour.’

  ‘In what sense, lady?’ asked Brother Rufus in a gentle voice.

  ‘His obsession with religion, which he must have had all his life, grew more extreme there. His first choice was to become a priest, not a doctor, but his parents would not allow it. Perhaps even then they suspected his strange notions.’

  ‘Which were?’ prompted Thomas, fascinated by this story of religious distortion.

  ‘That the perfection of the Church was established by the early founders in Rome and this was the only thing that mattered. Adherence to their precepts was the salvation of the world and any deviation from their rituals was the work of the devil.’

  ‘But many priests, especially in the higher orders, would fully agree with that!’ objected Rufus mildly.

  Cecilia coughed and paused a moment to rest her voice, Enyd patting her shoulder and offering her a cup of watered wine.

  ‘Not to the exclusion of every other topic,’ she continued after a while. ‘He preached at me continually, always on the same theme of the purity of the Church of Rome and the need to be always vigilant against its enemies and detractors. It became so monotonous that I tried to turn away from God, but he punished me for it.’

  ‘Punished? You mean by force?’ asked Hilda aghast.

  For answer Cecilia pushed up the loose sleeves of her surcoat and exposed her arms. They bore many yellow and green bruises, some of considerable age.

  ‘He often pulled and punched me, if I dared disagree with his ranting or was reluctant to go to devotions with him. But he took care to mark me only where it did not show in public’

  ‘The bastard!’ muttered John. ‘Who would have guessed it?’

  ‘The people in Salisbury, for a start,’ replied Cecilia. ‘Though he was an effective physician, as long as he was paid well enough, he could never resist preaching at his patients and became unpopular as a result.’

  ‘Was that cause enough to leave?’ asked Rufus.

  ‘The end began when he struck one woman who told him to leave religion to the priests and stick to prescribing pills!’ replied Cecilia. ‘The last straw was when he refused to treat a sick infant when he discovered it had not yet been baptised and it later died.’

  ‘And you say he was violent towards you – did he ever try to strangle you, like last night?’ asked Henry de Furnellis.

  ‘No, it was always shaking and striking,’ she said with tears in her eyes. ‘And he would also punish me by his strange ways in the bedchamber,’ she whispered, her pallid face flushing as she dropped her eyes in embarrassment.

  The sheriff hurried to cover up her distress by changing the direction of his questions. ‘We need to know why he tried to kill you and how that was connected to the death of Lady Matilda next door,’ he said gravely.

  Enyd held up her hand and then gave Cecilia a cup of warm honeyed milk. ‘She is talking too much, important as it is. Give her a moment’s rest, please.’

  Mary, who was hovering in the background, occupied the break by handing round the platter of pastries filled with chopped meat and herbs and refilling empty cups from the jugs that stood on the table. Soon, Cecilia finished her soothing draught and handed the mug back to John’s mother with a grateful smile.

  ‘It all happened so quickly last night,’ she continued. ‘Clement had claimed he had a sore throat since the previous evening and had bound up his neck with a length of flannel, just as I am now!’ She smiled wanly at the ironic similarity. ‘Last evening he came in from his work and said he was going to apply more liniment to his throat, so went into the bedchamber. A few moments later I happened to walk in on him and found him with his tunic opened at the neck, as he pulled off the long strip of flannel.’

  She stopped and stared down at her hands on the edge of the table, as if reliving that cataclysmic moment in her life.

  ‘And then?’ prompted John gently.

  ‘I saw that the skin of his neck was covered in scratches, running downwards under his chin and jaw. I knew what they were; they were made by fingernails clawing at his neck. Instantly, he tried to cover them up again with the cloth, to hide them from me, so I knew they came from some wrongdoing. My first thought was that they were from some woman’s passion in love-making, but then they should have been on his back and chest, not under his chin.’

  There was a silence, partly from further embarrassment at the carnal nature of the explanation, but also because Cecilia’s eyes had again filled with tears.

  ‘I was afraid to challenge him on his infidelity in case he began beating me, but he started ranting about heretics, claiming that this was all their fault. If it had not been for them and the need to exterminate every one, he raved at me, he would not have been in this predicament!’

  ‘What did he mean?’ asked the sheriff mystified.

  De Wolfe was quicker off the mark in his understanding. ‘Was he confessing to having set the fire that killed the fuller in Milk Lane?’

  Cecilia started to nod, but the movement hurt her neck and she grimaced before replying. ‘Yes, Sir John. Without my even asking, he started to complain about the forces of the devil being against him, when he was trying to perform God’s work in ridding the city of those who denied the omnipotence of the Holy Church. Those were his actual words!’

  She shuddered as she recollected that awful moment. ‘He said that as he was leaving Milk Lane after carrying out his duty as ordained by the Almighty, he saw Matilda de Wolfe standing in the doorway of St Olave’s and was sure that she had recognised him.’

  John groaned with dismay as he heard this, recollecting his wife’s stra
nge mood the following day, which must now be put down to her suspicions of the physician. For God’s sake, why did she not confide in him? he agonised.

  Enyd offered Cecilia another cup, but she shook her head.

  ‘By now, my husband was advancing on me, his hands reaching for my throat, as he knew he had fatally compromised himself.’ Her whispers were vibrant with emotion, and John’s mother slipped a comforting arm around her shoulder.

  ‘But my wife?’ croaked John. ‘What had happened?’

  ‘Clement said that he could no longer bear the suspense of waiting for her to denounce him and went into her house to confront her. She admitted she had seen him slink out of Milk Lane immediately after the fire had started. Not sure of his guilt, she was going to tell her husband the next day, as it was her duty as wife of a law officer.’

  De Wolfe groaned at the explanation. Matilda was prepared to follow her conscience, in spite of her antipathy to him – but she had left it too late.

  ‘So he silenced her, just as he tried to silence you?’

  Cecilia sobbed and Enyd held her tight. ‘He came for me and I ran in here, but he seized me by the throat. My poor little maid heard the commotion, ran in and tried to pull him off, but he felled her to the floor. He ranted that I was a heretic at heart, avoiding church when I could and refusing to join their petition to the canons. I shook him off and ran into the yard, trying to escape, but he followed … and that was the last I remember until you kind people revived me. He must have thought that he had left me dead!’

  ‘She has had enough now!’ said Enyd de Wolfe firmly. ‘We’ll put you to rest for a while, my dear.’

  As the other women went to settle Cecilia on her bed, the men continued to sit around the table in a subdued mood.

  ‘What happens now?’ asked Ralph Morin, who had been a silent listener to this drama. ‘Where does John stand in this?’

  Henry de Furnellis poured himself a pint of cider and drank half of it before replying. ‘Legally, he’s a sanctuary seeker and stands committed by a coroner’s jury to trial before the king’s judges,’ he said. ‘But as that idiot de Courtenay was so grossly influenced by Richard de bloody Revelle, I intend ignoring his verdict in the light of what has happened since.’