The Noble Outlaw

by Bernard Knight

  'What's this, for pity's sake?' he exclaimed. Gilbert screeched when he touched it and the apothecary fumbled in his bag for a vial of strong poppy syrup, a large dose of which he administered to the weaver. 'That will deaden the pain very soon,' he said reassuringly, covering up the shoulder again, after checking that the bleeding was now almost stopped.

  He turned to the despairing wife and the two sons, then motioned them to move a little further away. 'While that drug works its effect, tell me what you know of this,' he said in a low voice.

  'My father went out to the privy and came back like this,' growled the elder lad, a stocky youth of about eighteen. 'It looks as if someone has shot him with a crossbow, yet the missile looks too small.'

  'Have you been out to see if some miscreant is in the yard?' asked Lustcote.

  'I saw no one, but it is so dark and all I had was a flickering candle.'

  Richard shook his head wonderingly at the strange things that happened at night, then waited for the poppy extract to take effect. He considered having the injured man taken up to St John's Hospital, but the journey up to the East Gate would be very painful for Gilbert and would increase his shocked condition. Lustcote used half an hour to try to reassure the wife that the wound was not mortal, as the arrow or whatever it was had gone through the flaps of skin and muscle under the armpit and had thankfully missed any vital structures. What he did not tell them was that the main risk was from suppuration and gangrene, if the object had carried any dirt into the wound. By now, Gilbert le Batur had subsided into a drugged stupor, his breath puffing between slack lips, and the apothecary, with the help of the sons, turned him on to his side. With relative ease, Lustcote slid the projectile out of the wound at the back of the armpit.

  After seeing the wife clean up the dried blood and place new linen over the two wounds, he walked over to the firepit, where the flames from a pile of logs augmented the rush lights and candles.

  'What do you make of this?' he asked the sons, holding out the object he had taken from the wound. It was a short iron rod, somewhat longer than a hand, with a very sharp arrowhead on one end, being plain on the other. 'Just as well it had no fletching or I would never have removed it as easily as I did,' he said thankfully.

  'Any idea what it is?'

  The sons inspected the missile, then denied all knowledge of it. 'It's not a crossbow bolt,' said the elder. 'Too short and it has no leather flights.'

  'Your father is a very lucky man,' exclaimed Richard. 'This thing had the power to completely transfix his armpit. If it had hit him a few inches to the right, it would have gone into his heart. This was an attempt at murder.' The wife left her ministrations and came across, holding a bowl of water stained pink with blood. She and her boys were well aware of the fate of the three other guildmasters in recent weeks.

  'My husband was a master weaver, as you well know, Richard,' she said quaveringly. 'Is this yet another such attempt, d'you think?'

  The avuncular Lustcote put a hand gently on her shoulder. 'I do not know, Martha; that will be for the sheriff and maybe coroner to investigate. But at least this time it was an attempt, not a success. For that we must be thankful.'

  Cold and weary, muddy and hungry, the coroner and his officer reached Exeter just before dusk two days later. Gwyn went off to his dwelling in St Sidwell's to let his family know that he was still alive, whilst John took the valiant gelding back to Andrew's livery stables, then crossed the lane to his own house. After a warm welcome and a surreptitious kiss from Mary in the vestibule as he shed his cloak and boots, he went into the hall, wondering what sort of reception he would get from his wife after two weeks' absence.

  Matilda proved to be remarkably benign, as she had been just before he left. She even enquired if he was tired, which for her showed unusual solicitude. He sank into his chair by the fire and fondled the soft ears of old Brutus, who crawled up to greet him. Mary bustled in with mulled ale and hurried off again to bring him food from the kitchen shed.

  'Did you have a favourable response from the Archbishop?' demanded Matilda, preferring Hubert's episcopal tide to his more worldly rank. John, encouraged by her interest, launched into an account of his doings.

  'So I have brought a personal commission from Hubert Walter to bring the matter before the royal justices as soon as it can be arranged,' he concluded, passing the document across to her. Though like him she could not read it, the impressive seal gratified her, and John decided to play along with his new-found importance in her eyes to keep her in a sweeter mood for as long as possible.

  Mary came in with a wooden bowl of hot mutton stew and a small barley loaf. When John moved to the table to attack it enthusiastically, Matilda came to sit opposite, and she continued to surprise him.

  'While you were away, I kept closely in touch with that poor lady, Joan de Arundell,' she announced. 'I have tried to keep her spirits up by telling her that you will undoubtedly use your influence in Winchester and London to right this wrong, so I am glad that I have been proved right.' She said this as if she had personally arranged with the Almighty for the Archbishop of Canterbury to be sympathetic to her husband's petition.

  'And I have seen my brother again,' she added with a marked tightening of her thin lips. 'He called here a few days ago and seemed rather chastened. He was much more chastened when he left, after once more getting the length of my tongue about his deplorable conspiracy with that evil Henry de la Pomeroy.' There was a pause while Mary placed a trencher in front of him carrying a spit-roasted capon, accompanied by a platter of cabbage, beans and onions. At this time of year, the choice of food was becoming limited, but a fresh white loaf and hunk of cheese was to follow.

  When the maid had left, his wife resumed her monologue. 'Richard still maintains that the Hempston manor was escheated when it was thought that the lord had died, but that good lady assures me there was no evidence at all that her husband had perished.'

  John cut a thick slice of bread with his dagger and covered it with butter-fried onions. He paused with it halfway to his mouth. 'What did your brother say to that?'

  Matilda scowled at the memory. 'He told me to mind my own business and tell you to mind yours. He says he is aware you consorted with outlaws and intends reporting it to a higher authority.'

  De Wolfe gave a humourless laugh. 'Higher authority? I suppose he means that traitor Prince John. I doubt he'll do that, or the Chief Justiciar and his justices will come down harder on him than ever.'

  Matilda was in a difficult position: although her former loyalty to her brother had been whittled down to almost nothing, she was afraid that any worsening of his position might cost him his life.

  'I pray daily to God in Heaven that he would just retire to his manors and lead a quiet life.' Her voice quavered a little. John felt sorry for her, a strange feeling that beset him every so often.

  'If he just returns this manor to the rightful owner and cuts himself adrift from Pomeroy, then he might survive yet another fiasco,' he said gently, though he was not at all sure that the king's judges would agree with him.

  When he had finished his meal, he went back to the hearth with his wife and they sat silently for a while.

  Then he told her again about Hubert Waiter's provisional royal pardon for the outlaws and Matilda brightened up.

  'Will you let me tell Lady Joan the good news?' she asked. 'I have befriended her well since you left and would like to be the bearer of such welcome tidings.'

  John nodded, pleased to have something to lift her from her despondency. 'It means that Nicholas de Arundell can now leave the moor and come to live with his wife,' he said. 'He cannot yet return to his manor until the justices have deliberated, but no doubt her cousin will find room for him in that large house.'

  Matilda preened herself at the prospect of meeting another Crusading knight, who would no doubt be grateful for her support to his wife. Soon, a dog-tired John announced that he would seek his bed when he had finished the jug of wine. Even the
prospect of walking Brutus down to Idle Lane failed to seduce him from the blessed prospect of sleep. As he wearily took his saddle-bruised body up to the solar, the ever-cautious de Wolfe thought that things seemed to be going so well that maybe they might be going a little too well – perhaps Fate still had something unexpected in store for them all.

  As the coroner half expected, the next morning brought a multitude of problems that had accumulated during his absence. The faithful Thomas was genuinely delighted to see him when he climbed to the lofty garret in the gatehouse, then reported on a string of cases that had been either dealt with or shelved during the past two weeks. Most were routine, and a number had already been dealt with by the sheriff, rather to John's surprise, as Henry de Furnellis rarely exerted himself. Several men were rotting in the cells below the keep until the coroner could get around to taking their confessions, and several accidental deaths needed inquests, based on the depositions that Thomas had recorded earlier.

  However, the day soon brought some more pressing matters. The first was the arrival of Richard Lustcote, who appeared out of breath at the top of the winding stairs. The coroner sat him on a stool and listened with increasing concern to the apothecary's story.

  'This victim is another guild master?' he asked with a feeling of foreboding.

  'One of the best-known weavers in the city,' replied the apothecary. 'That is why I feared that this might be another one of those murderous attacks, though thankfully one that failed.'

  'How badly is he injured?'

  Richard pursed his lips in doubt. 'He lost some blood, but the damage is not mortal, unless it turns purulent.

  It depends on where that damned iron rod had been before it was used.' Feeling in his apothecary's bag, he produced the iron rod and handed it to the coroner.

  'This is the object that caused his wound - you had better keep it as evidence.'

  John and Gwyn examined the rusty metal with interest, but came to no conclusion about what it was, other than some crude form of crossbow bolt. De Wolfe scratched his stubble, in dire need of scraping with a sharp knife since he had last shaved in London. 'Did you seek the cause of this injury at the house?' he asked. 'I mean, the device that fired this thing at the weaver?'

  'I went out to the yard and the privy with his sons, but it was dark and all we had was a candle. I am an apothecary, not a constable.'

  The coroner accepted this and decided to go and look for himself. The apothecary took himself off to his shop and John went down to Rock Lane with his two acolytes behind him. They found Martha le Batur ministering to her husband with the assistance of another motherly woman who was her maid. Gilbert was on a low truckle bed in the solar, muffled up against the cold air under a pile of blankets. He was pale, which at least seemed to indicate that so far he had no fever from an infection of his wound.

  When they entered, he struggled to sit up, but he groaned at the pain in his heavily bandaged shoulder and fell back on to his pallet.

  'What do you recall about this affair?' demanded de Wolfe, sitting on a stool alongside the victim's bed, the wife and elder son hovering anxiously behind him.

  Gilbert was lucid, though his face was puckered with pain. 'Very little, Crowner, it was all over so quickly. I had the urge to visit the privy, as I often do after my supper. I put my hand on the latch and pulled the door open and immediately was struck in the shoulder.

  'You were lucky it was only your shoulder, father,' said the son. 'A few inches to one siide and it would have been your heart.'

  'I have the old elder tree to thank for that,' replied the weaver. 'It grew so much last summer that a branch now hangs across the privy door and makes you lean to the side to avoid scratching your head. I was going to cut it down, but now I'll spare it out of gratitude.'

  Further questions drew out nothing useful, as none of the family members saw or heard anyone lurking about the yard that night. John decided to examine the scene of the crime for himself, and Edwin, the elder son, took them across their yard at the back of the house to the privy, a simple structure of roughhewn planks with a tattered roof of mouldy thatch. It backed on to a lane at the rear of the burgage plot, where the night-soil man came with his cart once a week to shovel out the ordure that had accumulated.

  A trap at the back of the tiny hut gave him access to the foul space under the seating-board, which had a circular hole cut in the top. John examined the door, which was a crude panel of planks with thick leather hinges. It was held shut by a wooden latch that dropped into a slot on the doorpost, being opened from inside by lifting with a finger pushed through a hole. He looked at the inside and outside of the door and at first sight found nothing remarkable. Similarly, the walls of the privy appeared normal, being covered in peeling whitewash. It smelled less offensive than most buildings of this type.

  'Can you get into the lane from the yard?' asked Gwyn. Edwin nodded and led them around behind the adjacent pigsty, which smelled far worse than the privy, and opened a small gate in the wooden fence. They went out and studied the back wall of the latrine. Partly covered in shrivelled ivy, the boards were warped and shrunken in places, but Gwyn's sharp eye soon spotted something amiss.

  'The edge of that plank has been gouged away - and recently, by the looks of it.' He pointed to a place in the middle of the wall, yellowish heartwood being exposed where a small semicircle had been hacked out of the board. Above it, there was a gap between the planks, so given the depth of the gouge, the total defect in the back wall was at least an inch.

  'About chest height, too,' piped up Thomas. 'That iron rod would easily pass through that gap.'

  De Wolfe was running his fingertip over the planks within a hand's span of the hole. 'What about these, Gwyn?' he asked gruffly. He often sought his officer's opinion on practical matters.

  Gwyn peered closely at what John had indicated, his big red nose almost touching the planks. Then he felt them delicately, as the coroner had done. 'Screw holes, four of them,' he declared. 'Spaced evenly around that central gouge, and just as fresh, by the colour of the exposed wood.'

  They all stepped back into the lane, the son Edwin looking with admiration at these sleuths who could discover such obscure signs.

  'What does it mean, sir?' he asked.

  'Some device had been screwed to the outside of the back wall, then removed after the deed was done,' said de Wolfe.

  'What sort of device?' asked Thomas, always the most curious member.

  De Wolfe shrugged. 'How the hell would I know? Some sort of bow or spring, I suppose.'

  'But how would it be discharged?' persisted Thomas.

  'Did the assailant wait there all night in the hope that the man would go to the privy?'

  'My father is very regular in his habits, sirs,' offered Edwin. 'He goes to relieve himself about the same time every evening. If someone watched for a few nights, they could easily discover his routine.'

  John nodded his agreement, then walked back around into the yard and pulled open the latrine door once again. 'Use those keen eyes of your again, Gwyn,' he commanded, pointing at the inside of the door.

  His officer soon found what they were looking for, another fresh screwhole in the centre of one of the upper planks.

  'A booby trap, must have been,' said Gwyn. 'A cord tied around a hook or screwhead in the door, passed across to the back wall, then through the planks to whatever trigger was on this device.'

  The clerk, the least mechanically minded of them all, nodded in understanding. 'When the door was opened, the string tightened and fired the arrow. But there were no flights on it.'

  Gwyn grunted. 'At that short range, it would hardly matter. The distance from the door to the back of the privy is less that two paces. It could hardly miss!'

  'And if my father had not twisted to avoid that elder branch, it would have killed him,' added the son tremulously.

  Back in their bleak chamber in the gatehouse, the coroner and his team revived themselves with bread, cheese and cider
, their usual routine for a late extra breakfast. John sat at his trestle table and turned the metal bolt over in his fingers, staring at it intently, as if he could make it tell him who had planted it in the master weaver's latrine.

  'He must have set up his device just before Gilbert was due to attend to his bowels,' said Gwyn. 'Otherwise, he might have shot the wrong person.'

  'And removed it soon after, so as to get rid of the evidence,' said Thomas.

  There was silence, broken only by the sound of Gwyn champing his crusts and slurping his drink. 'What can be done to investigate this, Crowner?' asked Thomas eventually.

  'Damn all, once again,' replied John angrily. 'This is the fourth attack on guild masters and we've not the slightest idea of who or what's behind them.'

  There was another silence, then Thomas de Peyne spoke up rather diffidently. 'I've been thinking, sir,' he said. 'An odd notion has come to my mind.'

  Gwyn groaned in mock exasperation. 'Has God been talking to you again, little man?'

  The clerk ignored him and began to expound his theory to the coroner.

  'There is something common to all these four attacks, apart from the victims being prominent guild members.' John stared at his clerk from under his black brows.

  He had learned to respect Thomas's ideas, as the small priest was well-read and highly intelligent. 'And what might that be, Thomas?'

  'Think of the means of death in each case, master,' replied the clerk. 'Matthew Morcok, the man found in Smythen Street, was killed by an iron spike driven into his spine. Then Hamelin de Beaufort, the glazier, was found along the Buckfastleigh road, strangled with an iron chain. The next was Robert de Hokesham, the candlemaker, speared to a tree in St Bartholomew's by an iron spike. And last of all, we have Gilbert le Batur shot by an iron bolt.'