‘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 usu
al 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?’
The Tainted Relic Page 6