The Tainted Relic

by The Medieval Murderers

  The wizened servant shuffled his feet as he gave an abashed glance at both Nesta and the coroner. ‘I saw the landlady coming down the ladder, looking pale and shaken. There was blood on her apron, sir.’

  A buzz of concern ran around the crowd assembled in the yard. But de Wolfe gave a derisive bark. ‘For God’s sake, she had just been up to see if she could aid the man! Look at him, he was weltered in blood, of course she would get soiled!’

  ‘The other maid had no blood upon her!’ retorted the sheriff.

  ‘Then she probably kept well clear of the corpse!’ roared de Wolfe.

  ‘Probably? You make assumptions, Coroner.’ The sheriff turned back to the discomfited Martin. ‘Was this before or after the alarm was raised by this other “unsullied” maid?’ Richard emphasized the word sarcastically.

  The bottler looked more embarrassed than ever. ‘I feel pretty sure it was before, sir.’

  ‘Pretty sure?’ snarled de Wolfe. ‘What sort of evidence is that? De Revelle, you are wasting my time!’

  Now Thomas de Boterellis pushed forward and stood alongside the sheriff. He was a heavily built, podgy man, with a waxy complexion to his face, from which two rather piggy eyes looked out coldly upon the world.

  ‘My servant told me this early this morning, de Wolfe. I felt it my duty to notify Richard de Revelle, as it was a matter relating to a serious crime.’

  John snorted in disbelief. ‘Since when does a cathedral precentor go running to a sheriff over a death in an alehouse?’

  ‘Sir Richard is a particular friend of mine. We had business this morning and I happened to mention the matter,’ retorted the canon pompously.

  ‘And cockerels may happen to lay eggs!’ snapped de Wolfe. ‘Did the pair of you just happen to be coming all the way down here to the lower town this morning?’

  The sheriff blustered his way back into the acrimonious conversation.

  ‘The fact remains that this man was done to death in this woman’s tavern. She sleeps within a few yards of where he was killed, she was seen to go up and down repeatedly, she denied any knowledge of the death, apparently a valuable object is missing–and she was seen by a reputable witness to have blood on her clothes!’

  ‘All of which means absolutely nothing!’ roared John. ‘This stupid man can’t even remember if he saw the blood on the lady before or after the body was discovered!’

  ‘I seem to recollect that it was before,’ bleated Martin, trying to claw his way back into his master’s favour.

  Now de Wolfe completely lost his temper. ‘Listen! My inquest is over, my jury has agreed the verdict and that’s the end of it, until we find the real culprit!’ he roared. ‘So clear off, all of you, and attend to your own affairs!’

  The crowd, hugely intrigued to see this public row between their betters, stood gaping at the performance until Gwyn started to shoo them away, but de Revelle and the precentor stood their ground.

  ‘Unless you produce this “real culprit” very soon, John, the execution of my own duty to keep the peace by arresting malefactors might not be to your liking!’

  With this parting threat, he took the arm of de Boterellis and pushed through the dispersing crowd, leaving the coroner to stand fuming with rage, tinged with a little apprehension.

  An hour later, a council of war was held in the Bush, with all the staff of the inn and the coroner’s team clustered around a table, food and ale before them. John was concerned at the naked threat that the sheriff had made against Nesta.

  ‘That bastard’s got it in for you, Crowner,’ said Gwyn, through a mouthful of bread and cheese. He was feeling a little crestfallen for having failed to track down the precentor’s bottler to include him in his inquest jury, but his master had no blame for him, realizing that it was impossible to identify everyone who might have visited the alehouse the previous night.

  ‘As usual, de Revelle’s trying to get back at me for antagonizing him over his support for Prince John,’ growled de Wolfe. ‘That damned precentor is the same way inclined, currying favour with the bishop, who was one of the main players in the last revolt.’

  When Richard the Lionheart was imprisoned in Germany, his younger brother John had made an abortive attempt to seize the throne, and many of the barons and senior clerics who supported him were still covertly plotting another uprising.

  ‘How can we protect dear Nesta?’ broke in the ever practical Thomas, who worshipped the Welshwoman for her unfailing kindness to him.

  ‘As the bloody sheriff said, by finding the real killer,’ replied de Wolfe. ‘And quickly, for I suspect that de Revelle is keen to cause me as much trouble as possible, may God rot him!’ He turned to his mistress, who was looking defiant, but apprehensive. ‘Let’s get the story quite clear, cariad. Lucy screamed out when she found the body, so you ran up to the loft and went to look at it. That’s when you got blood on your apron?’

  ‘Of course! I bent down to make sure he was dead and got blood on my hands from the edge of the blanket. I wiped them on my apron, which was also soiled at the hem from blood on the floor.’

  ‘We need to find the bastard who did this, that’s the best way of getting Nesta off the hook,’ grunted Gwyn. ‘I’ll get back on the streets and find every man-jack that was in here last night and this morning–and every whore, too! I’ll shake them all until their teeth rattle, to get ’em to tell me all they know!’

  As good as his word, he swallowed the last of his ale and lumbered out into Idle Lane, leaving Thomas de Peyne to continue the debate.

  ‘We know now how that gold leaf got from Clyst St Mary to this place,’ he declared. ‘This man Gervase must have stolen it from that chapman.’

  ‘Which surely means that he was no priest, but a robber–probably an outlaw,’ observed Edwin.

  ‘Or had been a priest once, like me,’ added Thomas sadly. ‘But who would have known that he was carrying a valuable object, worth killing for?’

  ‘He wasn’t flashing it around in here, was he, Nesta?’ asked John.

  She shook her head emphatically. ‘No, he sat and had his food at that table over there, then drank a quart of ale and went up to bed. I hardly noticed him. Certainly he had no conversation with anyone else, as far as I remember.’

  Edwin, Lucy and the other maid agreed, confirming that the murder victim seemed a shadowy figure who met no one else that evening. They talked a while longer, but nothing new came to mind, and with considerable unease at having to leave Nesta behind at the inn, John reluctantly left for Martin’s Lane and another cheerless supper with his wife.

  Two hours before noon the next day the coroner, together with his clerk Thomas, were at the gallows field on Magdalene Street, half a mile outside the South Gate. Executions took place once or twice a week, depending on how many felons had been sentenced by the Shire Court or the Burgess Court. When the royal judges came to the city, either as Commissioners of Gaol Delivery or at the very infrequent Eyre of Assize, the gallows was busier, but this morning there were only three customers to be dispatched into the next, and hopefully better, life. The coroner had to be present, as he was responsible for confiscating all the worldly goods of the victim for the King’s treasury and recording the event on his rolls.

  Though mutilation, either cutting off a hand, castration or blinding, was a common penalty for serious assault or minor theft, murder or stealing anything worth more than twelve pence was a hanging offence, as was the capture of anyone previously outlawed. One of today’s felons was such an outlaw, another being a tanner who had beaten his wife’s lover to death on catching them in flagrante delicto and the third a boy of fifteen who had stolen a pewter jug worth twenty pence.

  A small crowd had assembled to watch the proceedings, some of them relatives of the condemned, the others spectators who came regularly, regarding the executions as a form of entertainment. These were mainly old men, housewives and grandmothers, with a horde of toddlers and urchins running around them. A few pedlars and pie-men alway
s attended, making a reasonable trade as the spectators waited for the show to begin. Even the town beggars and a couple of hooded lepers lingered on the edge of the crowd, rattling their bowls and crying for alms.

  The gallows was a massive beam supported at either end by two tree trunks. Five rope nooses dangled from it and ladders were propped at both ends. There were a number of hangmen in Exeter, all part time, as they also followed other trades. Today a slaughterman from the Shambles was officiating; he favoured the use of an ox-cart, rather than pushing the victims off a ladder. Hands lashed behind them, the victims were stood together on a plank across the cart, directly underneath the gallows. The executioner climbed up, put a rope around each neck, then gave the ox a smart smack across the rump, though it was so used to the routine that it hardly needed such a signal. As it trundled forward, the three poor wretches were left hanging momentarily in space, their screams abruptly cut off as the strangling rope cut into their throats. Immediately, members of the families of two of the condemned rushed forward and dragged down violently on their legs to shorten their suffering, but the outlaw, who had no one to see him off, was left to kick and twitch for several minutes until death mercifully overtook him.

  John watched the proceedings impassively, as violent and sudden death held no novelty for him, after more than twenty years on the battlefields of Ireland, France and the Holy Land. Thomas de Peyne was not made of such stern stuff and always turned his head away as the ox-cart began to move. As soon as the bodies had stopped dancing on their ropes, the crowd began to drift away, except for the wailing families, who lingered with their handcarts to claim the bodies for burial.

  The coroner waited for his clerk to gather up his writing materials and stow them away in his shoulder bag, then began walking back towards the city walls. It was hardly worth saddling up his stallion Odin for such a short distance, and within a few minutes they were approaching Exeter’s massive South Gate, where they saw a large figure coming towards them with a familiar rolling gait.

  ‘Here’s Gwyn. What’s he want?’ demanded Thomas.

  The usually phlegmatic Cornishman was agitated. ‘I’ve found a man who saw something in the Bush last night,’ he boomed. As they hurried back towards Idle Lane, the officer explained that he had managed to round up another dozen men who had been drinking in the tavern, and one of them remembered seeing a hooded man coming down the ladder late that night. ‘He says he wasn’t in a priest’s garb, but the hood was over his face and he had no cause to make any effort to recognize him.’

  ‘At least it lessens the threat against Nesta, if we have a new possibility,’ muttered John. ‘Have you kept this man at the Bush?’

  ‘They’re all there, Crowner. I told them they must wait until you came.’

  The new witnesses were in the taproom when they arrived, taking advantage of the wait to drink more ale. John questioned the man Gwyn had found, but he was unable to add any more to his recollection that the hooded man had come down the steps and vanished out of the front door.

  ‘His robe was grey and dirty, Crowner. I can say no more about him than that he was tall.’

  John questioned all the other men, but none of them had noticed the mysterious figure, and he became frustrated that there seemed no way of identifying the fellow.

  ‘He may have nothing to do with it,’ cautioned Thomas tentatively. ‘Perhaps he was one of the other lodgers from the loft.’

  Nesta shook her head as she stood listening. ‘None of those travellers was particularly tall–and none wore a dirty grey robe,’ she said firmly.

  John de Wolfe snarled again at the men, trying to force someone to remember more details, but they all shook their heads sadly, despite the fact that they would have liked to help both the coroner and his popular mistress.

  Then suddenly there was a voice from behind him, a sing-song piping that came from a vacant-faced youth who had been squatting in a corner.

  ‘I know who he was! I begged him for a ha’penny for ale when he came out of the door.’

  There was a sudden silence as everyone turned to look down at the ragged boy. Though not an idiot, he was ‘simple’, as the tolerant locals called him, a loose-lipped, runny-nosed lad with an abnormally big head. Nesta, who gave him spare food almost every day, crouched down beside him and spoke to him gently.

  ‘Peter, did you see his face? Who was he?’

  The boy looked at her and then at the expectant men with an almost pitying expression.

  ‘Don’t you know? It was Simon Claver, him with the rotten nose that used to live in Smythen Street.’

  At this, there was a babble of voices from the surrounding men, cut short by de Wolfe’s harsh voice.

  ‘Who in hell is Simon Claver?’ he demanded.

  ‘He was a smith, from just up the road here,’ answered the potman.

  ‘Simon beat up his brother-in-law more than a year ago, half killed him!’

  There were murmurs of agreement from the others. ‘He escaped the hue and cry and secured sanctuary in Holy Trinity,’ continued old Edwin, who knew all the local scandals. ‘Then he abjured the realm, but ran away before he got ship at Topsham, so he was outlawed.’

  The coroner looked across at Gwyn and nodded. ‘Sounds as if he could be our man–but where the hell do we look for him?’

  De Wolfe’s desire to lay his hands on the killer of Gervase was multiplied a thousandfold by that evening, as while he was sitting at his cheerless supper table with Matilda, Gwyn arrived in a state of extreme agitation to report that the sheriff had arrested Nesta on suspicion of murder.

  ‘The bastard sent half a dozen men-at-arms to the Bush and they’ve dragged her off to Rougemont!’

  Though Gwyn was unwelcome in the house because of his wife’s antipathy to what she called ‘Celtic savages’, the urgency of the situation made both him and his master careless of her antagonism.

  ‘There’s even talk of putting her to the ordeal of water,’ roared Gwyn angrily. This was a primitive test for guilt reserved for women, whereby they were thrown bound hand and foot into deep water. If they sank, they were innocent; if they floated, they were guilty and hanged. Men were forced to run barefoot over nine red-hot ploughshares or pick a stone from the bottom of a cask of boiling water–if burns developed, they were judged guilty.

  John leapt up from the supper table, his stool crashing over behind him.

  ‘She can’t be put in those foul cells under the keep!’ he yelled. ‘Not with that evil pervert Stigand as her gaoler.’ He glared across at his wife. ‘Your damned brother is doing this out of sheer malice, Matilda! No woman should be kept in Rougemont at the mercy of that fat swine!’

  Matilda looked back impassively at her husband for a long moment, and John wondered whether she was going to use this as a way of punishing him.

  Then she too rose from her chair and came around to him.

  ‘Call Lucille to bring my mantle. I’ll come with you to see Richard–but only to keep that woman from the cells. I’ll not interfere in anything else.’

  The next morning saw John de Wolfe at the castle at the crack of dawn, after an almost sleepless night worrying about Nesta and the implacable resolve of Richard de Revelle to blame her for the killing at the Bush.

  In the cold morning light of his gatehouse chamber, he told Gwyn and Thomas what had transpired the previous evening when he had confronted the sheriff.

  ‘Thank God my wife had enough compassion to persuade her brother to lock Nesta in an empty chamber on the upper floor of the keep, rather than in that hellhole in the undercroft. Gabriel’s wife will attend her and at least see that she is fed until I can get her released.’

  ‘What about the bloody sheriff?’ growled Gwyn. ‘Is there no chance of him coming to his senses over this?’

  John shook his head. ‘He has the bit between his teeth, aided by that damned precentor. This is a heaven-sent opportunity for them to get even with me for hounding them about their treacherous sympathy for
Prince John.’

  Thomas looked even more miserable than usual, hunched on his stool, wringing his hands in anguish. ‘How can we save dear Nesta, Crowner? I fear for her very life, now that the sheriff is set upon making her a scapegoat.’

  ‘Find the real killer, this Simon Claver! I tried to persuade de Revelle last night that this was the obvious way, but his mind is as closed as his ears. He refused even to countenance a search for the man, saying that the word of an imbecile lad was no grounds for looking for anyone other than the landlady of the tavern!’

  ‘But where the hell would we start looking, Crowner?’ observed Gwyn glumly.

  ‘That stolen relic is of no value to the thief until he can sell it,’ pointed out Thomas. ‘He has to find a buyer, and the only people interested would be religious houses.’

  De Wolfe drummed his fingers on his table. ‘He may first have gone back to his outlaw gang in the forest. I couldn’t persuade the sheriff to lift a finger against them, he claimed it was a waste of effort.’

  Gwyn scratched a few fleas from his unruly red thatch as he thought.

  ‘Gabriel told me that de Revelle was leaving this morning for his manor at Tiverton, to spend a few nights with his wife, God help her. Maybe we can persuade Ralph Morin to take out a posse while the sheriff’s away?’

  The ‘posse comitatus’ was an invention of old King Henry, who authorized each county to mount bands of armed men to seek out wrongdoers when necessary. The idea appealed to the coroner, and he went off to the keep to seek his friend the constable, who commanded all the men-at-arms of the castle garrison. Though Ralph had no love for de Revelle, he was at first uneasy about going against his wishes, but John persuaded him that the sheriff had not actually prohibited a search, only shown a lack of enthusiasm.

  By the tenth hour, a score of soldiers, led by Morin and Sergeant Gabriel, were marching over the drawbridge of Rougemont and meeting up at the South Gate with the coroner, his officer and another twenty volunteers from the Bush. These had rallied around to try to help the plight of their favourite innkeeper, and with a motley collection of swords, pikes and daggers, they tagged on behind the column of soldiers. All were on foot, as horses were of no use for combing the woods for fugitives.