De Wolfe reached Martin’s Lane and delivered his horse to the stables opposite his house, then walked the rest of the way up to the castle. He had thought to go straight to see Roger Trudogge and negotiate some kind of exchange for Gwyn’s sword, but then decided to see if any new deaths or other mayhem had been reported in his absence. He found Thomas at work as usual on his parchments, as there was much copying to be done to provide duplicates for various courts and the royal archives. The clerk looked up as he entered and enquired after Gwyn, then went on to deliver a nugget of information from the cathedral Close.
‘You know, Crowner, that I sleep on a pallet in a passageway of the house of one of the canons. Well, early this morning, as people were stirring to go to Prime, I chanced to hear two of the canon’s vicars talking in a room nearby, that had only a curtain for a door.’
John grunted, as he was well aware that Thomas was the most inquisitive person west of Winchester and that ‘chancing to hear’ probably meant that he had had his ear pressed to the door-curtain.
‘One of them was asking the other’s advice about repeated confessions he had been hearing from a particular supplicant,’ the clerk continued. ‘Though he could not repeat the content, even to a fellow priest, he felt it was so serious that he would have to consult their canon, the archdeacon or even the bishop about whether he should break the sanctity of the confessional and divulge something to the secular authorities.’
John frowned at his clerk, puzzled as to why he was being told this, as it seemed a matter for the ecclesiastical community. Usually, such dilemmas concerned flagrant breaches of morals as well as the law, such as sexual transgressions like incest or the ravishing of women or even children.
‘But what’s this to do with the coroner, Thomas?’ he asked gruffly.
The clerk’s bright little eyes glinted as he delivered his punch-line. ‘The man they were talking about was Martin Knotte!’ he whispered conspiratorially.
The coroner hurried down through the city, his wolfskin cloak flying out behind him in the breeze like a large bat as he loped along, his dark head thrust out before him. Thomas pattered along behind him, unsure of what all this was leading to, apart from the fact that his master was going to have strong words with the chief clerk at the fulling mills.
For his part, de Wolfe turned over Thomas’s news in his mind as he pushed his way through the crowded streets to reach the West Gate. What was all this about–or was it a complete irrelevancy? Perhaps the clerk’s confession was merely about being unfaithful to his wife, but that would hardly be grounds for the vicar’s grave concern.
Could it be that Martin Knotte had learned something damning about Serlo or even Christina? Had he discovered that one of them had in fact dispatched Walter Tyrell? And did loyalty to his employer conflict with his conscience and his public duty?
‘Only one bloody way to find out!’ he growled under his breath, as he strode along. ‘Shake it out of the fat bastard!’ De Wolfe always favoured the direct approach to problems.
At the mill on the river, he went straight to the clerk’s hut, where he left Thomas outside, fearing that a witness might distract his quarry from John’s intended verbal assault. Inside, he found Martin sitting at his table with a quill in his hand, poised over a parchment. The man looked ill, his podgy face almost a waxy colour.
He jumped to his feet and courteously pulled up a stool for the coroner on the other side of his bench. As John sat down, the big sword jabbed against the wooden floor and became unhooked from his belt, not being designed for warriors who sat indoors. With a cluck of irritation, he pulled it from under his cloak and rested it against the table in front of him, before glaring at the man who had resumed his seat opposite.
‘Now then, what’s the trouble, Knotte?’ he demanded brusquely. ‘Never mind how I know, but it has come to my ears that you have information that is distressing you. Is it something that I or even the sheriff should know about, eh?’
If it had been possible for the clerk to grow any paler, he would have done so. Stutteringly, he denied any problems, but his demeanour patently gave the lie to his words. De Wolfe kept at him, rasping and demanding that he divulge anything that law officers should know about, but Martin Knotte remained adamant in his tremulous denials.
‘Those priests have broken their trust,’ he complained bitterly. ‘How else could you know of this?’
‘Ha! So there is something!’ snarled de Wolfe, triumphantly. ‘You admit it now?’
Knotte shook his head stubbornly. ‘It is a personal, private matter, Crowner. It does not concern you, and you should not persecute me like this!’
John stood up, leaning on the table and glowering down at the seated clerk. ‘Does it concern Serlo, your master?’ he shouted. ‘Or perhaps the widow Christina?’
Martin shook his head violently, ‘Why should it? It has nothing to do with them.’
‘Are you just being faithful to them?’ barked John. ‘Misplaced loyalty will not save your neck if it conceals knowledge you may have against the King’s Peace!’
Again the ashen-faced man fended off all the coroner’s efforts to prise information from him, subsiding into a stubborn denial of any knowledge of wrong-doing by his employer.
Eventually, de Wolfe lost patience and jumped to his feet to wag a stern finger at Martin. ‘Then I must go and tackle Serlo himself, to drag the truth from him. It will go badly for you if I discover that you have been concealing anything from me!’
He stalked out of the hut and swept up Thomas outside, hurrying him around the corner of the nearest mill-shed in his search for the master-fuller. If he had not left Martin in such a temper, he would have remembered to ask the man about Serlo’s whereabouts, but now he had to seek him himself. As a workman passed, bent under the weight of a large bale of raw wool, John glared at him and demanded to know where his master was to be found.
‘Try the lower mill, sir,’ replied the man. ‘I saw him there an hour ago.’ They went across the yard to another large, but ramshackle wooden building and Thomas pointed to a small shed attached to one end. ‘That looks like the hut of the other clerk. He may be in there.’
But Serlo was not there, neither was he in the fulling mill, where a score of men and boys, some of them children, were labouring at tanks and troughs of water. They were washing fleeces, some treading them rhythmically with their feet to remove the dirt and grease, throwing in handfuls of fine clay to assist the process.
Above the incessant splashing and chatter, Thomas managed to question several men, but came back to de Wolfe shaking his head. ‘He has gone again, no one knows where,’ he reported as they walked out of the watery hell that was the workplace of so many of Exeter’s citizens.
‘Damn the man, he’s never around when I want him!’ growled the coroner.
‘He’s unlikely to have fled the country now that he’ll soon own all this if he weds Widow Christina,’ observed Thomas, waving an arm around them.
‘Let’s go, then, I’ve had enough for today,’ grunted de Wolfe. Then he stopped walking and slapped his left hip, feeling an empty space. ‘Damnation, I’ve left Gwyn’s sword in the clerk’s hut. I wanted to take it back to the armourer on the way home.’
They changed direction and went the few hundred paces back to the upper mill. At the hut, John pushed at the door and found it immovable.
‘Strange, it must be jammed,’ he muttered, putting his shoulder to the door with little effect.
‘There’s no keyhole, so it must be barred on the inside,’ said the observant Thomas.
Now suspicious, John hammered on the boards with his fist and yelled for Martin Knotte to open it. There was no response and he kicked at the door, this time feeling it creak and bend. A few more hefty blows with his foot splintered several of the thin planks, sufficient for him to put his arm through and push the bar up out of its brackets.
As it flew open, he charged in, shouting angrily. ‘You can’t get away with it by avoidin
g me, fellow!’ he yelled.
Then he stopped dead, Thomas peering round him at a gruesome sight. Martin Knotte knelt in the corner of the room, as if in prayer. His right shoulder was supported by the wall, keeping his body upright, though he was stone dead. He was impaled on Gwyn’s sword, the point embedded in the lower part of his chest, the pommel jammed into the angle of the walls and floor. Blood lay in a wide, spreading pool around him and dribbled obscenely from the corner of his mouth.
‘Great Christ, what does this mean?’ rasped de Wolfe hoarsely, as his clerk began crossing himself rapidly and murmuring Latin prayers for the dead.
The coroner strode across to the corpse, to make sure that he was past any aid, then pulled the body over on to its side, so that he could withdraw the sword.
‘Is this another murder, master?’ asked Thomas in a horrified whisper.
‘Falling on a sword in a locked room?’ he snapped. ‘I don’t think so, Thomas! The man has committed felo de se! But why, for God’s sake?’
As he removed the six inches of steel from Knotte’s chest, the more squeamish Thomas turned away and as he did so, his eyes fell on a sheet of parchment left on the end of the table. While the coroner was straightening out the limbs of the corpse, his clerk began reading the document, the ink of which was hardly dry.
He held it out towards de Wolfe. ‘I think I had better read this to you, Crowner!’ he said tremulously.
By noon the following day, Gwyn was back in his usual place in the Bush Inn, sitting opposite John de Wolfe at his table near the fire-pit. Thomas de Peyne was next to him, the pair beaming at the reunion, as was Nesta when she slipped on to the bench alongside her lover.
‘I’ve got five minutes before I need to check that stupid new cook-maid hasn’t overcooked the mutton,’ she said. ‘So tell me what happened today.’
‘I escaped from that damned priory today!’ guffawed Gwyn. ‘Their ale wasn’t too bad, but they live on bloody fish! I’d have grown fins if I’d stayed there any longer.’
‘But why were you able to come out, that’s the point?’ persisted the auburn-haired landlady.
De Wolfe broke in, to begin telling her the story of his suspicions of the whore’s pimp, then of Serlo and Christina, all of which were confounded by Martin Knotte’s suicide.
‘I had it all wrong, twice over,’ he admitted. ‘But there was never any reason even to consider that fat clerk down at the mills.’ He stopped to take a long pull at his quart of Nesta’s fine ale. ‘At least, not until Thomas read out that message that Martin Knotte had penned just before he spitted himself on Gwyn’s sword.’
‘Not my sword any longer, Crowner!’ grunted the Cornishman. ‘Thank God you’ve already taken it back to Roger Trudogge. The bloody thing had bad fortune written all over it, not some Latin message!’
Ignoring his officer’s interruption, John continued with his tale. ‘Serlo and Christina, whatever their secret passions, had nothing to do with Walter’s death, glad though they might now be that it’s turned out this way.’
‘But what about that horrible fellow from the whorehouse?’ demanded Nesta. ‘You said that he had Walter’s purse full of money!’
‘That slimy bastard told the truth for once, that he had taken it from the corpse. When the harlot Bernice told him how much coin she had glimpsed on Walter’s belt, he ran after him, presumably to assault and rob him in the alley. But someone had already done the job for him and all he had to do was snatch the purse and run.’
‘He’ll hang for the theft anyway, even if he didn’t kill Walter,’ observed Gwyn with some satisfaction.
‘But what did Martin Knotte’s message say?’ asked Nesta, impatiently.
De Wolfe gestured at Thomas. ‘Let him tell you, he was the only one who could read it!’
The little clerk wriggled self-consciously, but was quite pleased to be asked. ‘It was a confession of his partiality to the sin of Sodom,’ he began portentously.
‘You mean, he liked buggering boys?’ growled the down-to-earth Gwyn. ‘Then at least that sword did a bit of good, in getting rid of him!’
‘It seems that he had long suffered from this aberration, but had managed to conceal it from everyone, until the night of Walter’s murder,’ continued Thomas. ‘Being a married man, he had to use that hut in the fulling mills for his activities and early that evening, Walter walked in unexpectedly.’
‘Caught him in flagrante delicto with a lad from Bretayne,’ explained John, Bretayne being the slum area down near the west wall of the city.
‘His master was outraged and promised to expose him next day to his wife and the cathedral proctors.’
‘Why them?’ asked Nesta. ‘Surely such a crime should go to the sheriff?’
Thomas shook his head. ‘As a clerk, he was in lower religious orders and could claim ‘benefit of clergy’, he explained. ‘That would remove judgment on his misdeeds from the secular to the ecclesiastical authorities.’
‘Though after the bishop’s Consistory Court found him guilty, they might well hand him over to the sheriff to be hanged,’ added John, with some satisfaction.
‘The note ended with a confession that he had panicked and lain in wait for Walter to come out of the brothel. As his clerk, he knew he was going to the New Inn that night to collect payment for wool, so he followed him and the first chance he had to slay him was in that alley off Waterbeer Street.’ Thomas paused to make the sign of the cross at the memory. ‘He had taken a large knife that was used in the mill for cutting the ropes binding wool bales. He used it to slash at Walter’s neck, then ran away.’
‘Yes, but that was days ago,’ objected Nesta. ‘Why wait until last night to kill himself?’
‘His conscience eventually drove him to it,’ explained the clerk. ‘He knew that Gwyn was being falsely accused by the sheriff and was in grave danger of being hanged. Then the Crowner’s persistence in trying lay the blame on his master Serlo and Christina was the last straw. If he didn’t own up, someone was going to suffer. Even though Martin Knotte was an evil pervert, he still had some sense of honour.’
There was a thoughtful silence, broken by a loud belch from Gwyn. ‘What did that other bastard, Richard de Revelle, say when you took him the parchment?’ he asked.
‘Huffed and puffed, refused to believe it, saying it was a forgery!’ answered John, grinning lopsidedly at the memory of the sheriff’s discomfiture. ‘It took a view of Martin’s corpse, the shattered door and the bloody sword before he grudgingly admitted that it must be true.’
‘A bloody sword indeed!’ said Gwyn with feeling. ‘I wonder what will become of it now?’
John de Wolfe drained the last of his quart. ‘Roger Trudogge said that he might already have sold it again,’ he said. ‘It seems that some knight took a fancy to it before we bought it and wanted the armourer to let him know if it came up for sale again. He wants a good weapon to take on this new Crusade we hear about, the one that’s leaving from Venice.’
‘I wish him luck with it!’ grunted Gwyn. ‘He’ll need it.’
ACT TWO
Venice, 1262
I stare across over the moonlit water at the two little humps of islands that house the churches of S Cristoforo and S Michele. These are my primary targets, where I can rest and plan my escape properly. The tide is low in the lagoon, but it will soon come rushing back–I will have to hurry. I slide down on to the muddy, weed-skirted margins, and squelch my way out to the water’s edge, where I begin wading. Halfway across, I turn for one more look at La Serenissima. Venice is now no more than a long, low line of dark buildings stretching far to my left and right. I wonder if this will be my last view of my home. I refuse to contemplate the thought for too long, not least because leaving Venice for good also means leaving sweet and sexy Caterina. And that I do not want.
The sword is strapped across my back, safe in its sheath from the depredations of the salt water. I prod ahead of myself with a long staff, feeling my way through the mud
. Eventually, waist-deep in water, I can’t see where I am putting my feet. Only the staff tells me if the next step is safe or not, that I am not stepping into a hole, or into soft, clinging mud. I am sweating despite the cold water, and suddenly the sword slips, lodging awkwardly under my left arm. I stumble, and panic for a moment, recalling this very thing happening in a dream. I lose my grip on the staff, and plunge into an abyss. The cold, muddy waters of the lagoon close over my mouth, choking me. I go down under the surface, the mud churning up as I thrash around. I can taste the fetid water as it invades my mouth–the cloying taste of rotting flesh and cemetery earth. I try to call out for Caterina but the mud in my mouth prevents me from doing so, muffling my cries for help. Then my blindly groping hand finds the staff again. It has jammed upright, and I manage to right myself.
I pause for a while to regain my breath, spitting out salt water and stinking filth. It has been a close call. The softest mud patches can suck a fully-grown man down and down until he simply disappears off the face of God’s Earth. Angry at the sword for once again putting me in mortal danger, I rip the binding free that holds it to my body, and feel its considerable weight in the grip of my right hand. This goddamn sword has been the source of all my troubles, including an accusation of murder. Now is the time to be rid of it, and then maybe my luck will change for the better. I steady myself, and yank on the hilt. The sword comes out slickly smooth from its sheath, and I heft it in the night air. The moon reflects coldly on its polished surface, only slightly scarred by my own misuse at the very tip. The light causes the inscription to seem to sparkle mockingly in my eyes. I don’t need to read it–the legend is as firmly engraved on my heart as it is on that perfect blade.
‘Qui falsitate vivit, animam occidit. Falsus in ore, caret honore.’
I growl at such a pious sentiment. What harm does a little lying do to the soul? And as for honour–give me profit any day. I swing the blade in a glittering arc, and stand for a moment with the sword held up to the moon by my outstretched arm. If I swing it once more and let go, it will sail away to disappear for good in the mud of the lagoon. Out of harm’s way. Thinking back to how the sword came into my possession, I nevertheless begin the arching swing…
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