The Golden Crucifix: A Matthew Cordwainer Medieval Mystery (Matthew Cordwainer Medieval Mysteries Book 1)

by Joyce Lionarons

  “Master Cordwainer will never give up being Coroner willingly,” said Thomas. “Twould be useless to try.” He stood while Adam rapped on the door. “Twas good to see you. I’ll tell my Master you -- .”

  The door opened, and a young woman in her mid-teens stood smiling at them. “God give you good day, Master Cordwainer,” she said to Adam, and then nodded at Thomas, her smile widening. She was, he thought, the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, with green eyes and a pert nose with a sprinkling of light freckles. A strand of golden hair had escaped from the silk wimple and veil she wore, and her gown was belted with the same silk around a trim waist. A cluster of keys hung from the belt, marking her as mistress of the house. But was she Pomeroy’s daughter or a young wife? He realized he was staring and turned his head away, backing up as Adam entered the house.

  “Nay, nay.” said the girl. “Come in. Tis cold outside, and we have a warm fire and hot wine ready to drink.”

  Thomas glanced at Adam, who nodded his assent. The girl smiled. “I’m Emma,” she said to Thomas. Turning to Adam, she added, “Papa is in his office above stairs. You may go up, if you wish.”

  “Aye,” said Adam. “I’ll not stay long. Twill be dark soon.”

  As Adam climbed the stairs, Emma turned again to Thomas. “Please sit by the fire while I fetch some wine.” She stepped lightly out through an open doorway at the back of the room. Thomas stood twisting his hat in his hands, unaccustomed to being waited on. She was Pomeroy’s daughter, not his wife. He gazed at a high cabinet filled with silver goblets and glass cups with gold edging on the rims, at the cushions elaborately embroidered in silk thread on chairs by the fire, thinking about the wealth they represented. Any girl from a family as wealthy as this would be destined for marriage to an equally wealthy man, would never be interested in a mere manservant or allowed to be so by her parents. The smile was politeness, nothing more. Mother Mary and all the saints, she was beautiful!

  “Thomas, take off your cloak and sit.” Emma came forward carrying a tray with a flagon of steaming wine, two cups, and a plate of wafer-thin cakes drizzled with honey. She set the tray carefully on a low table between the chairs. “Here, let me take that for you. Tis our serving girl’s day free, and I forgot. You must think me terribly rude.” She drew his cloak from his shoulders and hung it on a peg by the door.

  “Nay,” said Thomas, “not rude at all. Thank you for the wine.”

  Emma laughed. “I’m certain your Master thinks me rude, letting him go above stairs in his cloak! Papa will chastise me. Do you think I should bring wine to apologize?”

  Her smile was infectious, and Thomas laughed with her. “Nay,” he said. “Tis best to ignore it. Master Adam will never notice.” He accepted the cup she offered and they sat close to the fire. Emma chattered on as Thomas watched the play of the firelight in her eyes. He let the wine loosen his tongue and found himself trying to think how to make her laugh. When he succeeded, he felt extraordinarily happy. After a while he noticed her giving him a quizzical look. “What?” he asked.

  “I’m trying to decide how old you are,” said Emma. “Are you Master Cordwainer’s journeyman or his apprentice?”

  “I am neither,” said Thomas. “Adam is not my Master.”

  “But then,” she faltered. “Why are you here?”

  “We were walking together, and you invited me,” answered Thomas.

  Emma burst out laughing. “I’m glad you were not strangers to each other,” she said, “for I would have invited you in nonetheless. But what are you, then?”

  Thomas considered saying he and Adam were simply friends, but decided she deserved the truth. “I work for old Master Cordwainer, Adam’s father.”

  “And what do you do for him?”

  “I’m his manservant.”

  A flurry of emotions passed over Emma’s face: confusion, embarrassment, irritation, and finally amusement. She burst into laughter again. Thomas flushed, uncertain if she were laughing at him or not. Voices sounded behind him, and he turned to see Adam descending the stairs with his cloak over his arm, a slim, fair-haired man with pale eyes behind him. “Papa!” said Emma. “This is Thomas. We’ve been having a most entertaining conversation.”

  Thomas rose and gave a slight bow to Pomeroy, who nodded. “Fetch Thomas’s cloak, Emma. Adam tells me he must leave, for tis dark and the gate at Bootham Bar will be closing.”

  “Aye, Papa.” Emma leapt up and hurried to the door to take Thomas’s green cloak from its peg. Thomas followed, pulling his shapeless hat onto his head. As he wrapped the cloak around himself, Emma touched his arm. “Please come visit again,” she whispered. “You don’t need Adam to visit me.” Thomas nodded, but seeing Adam and Master Pomeroy approach, said nothing. “May God go with you,” Pomeroy said, and they stepped out of the house.

  The lane outside the house was dark and the wind blew cold from the north, but Pomeroy had loaned Adam a small glazed lantern that lit their way to Stonegate. “Shall I light you home?” asked Adam, “or are you able to find your way from here?”

  “I’ll be fine,” said Thomas. “The shops are still lit and folk are in the streets. Besides, Master Cordwainer always says I can see in the dark like a cat, and he’s not far wrong. He will be sorry he missed you.”

  Adam laughed. “Then he shall have to venture out past Bootham Bar one of these days for a visit. One would think the walls of York enclosed the world, the way he lives. You may tell him I said so.” He raised the lantern in salute and turned north toward Petergate.

  Thomas raised his own hand in farewell, then walked south toward Coney Street, a smile on his face and his mind full of Emma Pomeroy.

  Monday, January 9, 1273

  1

  Monday dawned clear and bright, but the strong north wind that had swept the snowstorm to the south still rattled shutters and raised drifts where there had been an even blanket of snow. Cordwainer sat at the oak table in his front chamber listening to the noise and clatter of folk going about their business in the street outside and pondering the events of the past days. His grey hair was tied back with a leather lace, and his beard, although somewhat longer than the current fashion, was neatly trimmed, but his bushy eyebrows stuck out in all directions, giving him a disheveled look despite Thomas’s efforts. A pewter cup of watered wine sat before him, next to a plate containing the remnants of a breakfast of freshly-baked bread and yellow cheese. Despite the expensively glazed window set in a deep casement by the door, the shutters were tightly latched against the cold. Candles burned throughout the room and a fire crackled in the hearth. He could hear Thomas and Agytha moving about in the kitchen at the back of the house, his housekeeper’s voice rising in motherly admonition.

  He took a deep drink of the wine and set the cup back on the table, wondering how much Thomas remembered of his real mother. Twas her death from childbed fever that had brought Thomas into his service after all. Thomas’s father, Adam Morlond, had been Cordwainer’s manservant and closest friend; he had named his own son Adam after him. But when Adam’s wife Beatrice died, Morlond had sunk into a deep depression and months later, unable to shake off his melancholy, had sought refuge from his grief in the King’s call for troops against the traitor Simon Montfort, leaving Thomas in Cordwainer’s care. He died at the battle of Lewis. At the time, Thomas had been little more than a toddler with white-blond hair and stubby legs; in the years since, he had grown into a steady, sensible young man with the patience of Job and the thick skin necessary to serve his curmudgeonly master. He never spoke of his parents, but nor did he seem to regard Agytha as a mother or Cordwainer as a father.

  Cordwainer rose from the table with a grunt and carried his wine to the chair by the window. He sank onto its cushion and placed his foot on the padded stool. War, he mused, was a curious thing, bringing utter destruction to some and good fortune to others. He had never been in a battle nor trained as a soldier, but his own grandfather had fought for an earlier Henry as a pikeman and in doing so h
ad quite accidently found himself in a position to save the life of a newly-dubbed knight from a wealthy family. The young man’s father, grateful for the life of his heir, had prevailed upon the King to reward Simon Cordwainer for his efforts and bravery with a living. This Simon had promptly invested in the wool trade, allowing his profits to grow until he could leave the making of shoes to others – although he kept the Cordwainer name. Over the years he had amassed a tidy fortune trading good northern wool to wealthy merchants in the south. Cordwainer’s father had doubled that fortune, and Cordwainer himself had managed to maintain it despite his utter boredom with trade and all it entailed. He had settled the business on his son Adam as soon as he decently could when the boy had come of age, reserving a generous allowance for himself. He would be content to live in town for the rest of his life, happy if he never saw sheep or ship or raw wool again.

  He had become Coroner for the first time twelve years ago. The position added a bit of income and gave him status in the city, but more importantly, it gave him a welcome outlet for his curiosity and intellect, without which he tended to become even more irritable than usual. Not that much intellect was required in the majority of the deaths he investigated. Most could be easily attributed to disease or accident, and when there was actual killing done, most often the perpetrator had the good grace either to do it in a public, generally drunken, brawl, or to remain weeping at the scene of the crime.

  Not this time, though. Cordwainer took a sip of his wine and sorted through the facts in his mind. He didn’t believe for a minute that Warin Butcher had killed the maudlyn. For one thing, the girl Molly had been tall for a woman, and a man of Warin’s height would have had a hard time getting a strap around her throat and throttling her without something to stand on. And wouldn’t a butcher have used a knife? Easy enough to slit the maudlyn’s throat in her room. He tried to picture the fat, quivering man holding a knife to Molly’s throat. As a butcher, Warin would be accustomed to killing animals without a qualm, but Cordwainer didn’t see him having the stomach to kill a human being or any reason for doing so. Nay, twasn’t Warin, whatever Bartholomew Weaver might think.

  His mind ran quickly over the men who had responded to the hue and cry. Once the alarm was raised, it would take a cold killer to run back to the body, but it would take the same coldness to strangle a woman on the street. Bartholomew was tall enough and certainly strong, as were a few of the others, Godwyn Taverner for one. But Cordwainer hadn’t liked the scowl on the weaver’s face or the way he’d been so quick to assign blame. He wondered also what a weaver – or weaver’s apprentice more likely, as the lad looked only in his teens -- had been doing in the Shambles after dark. He didn’t think there were any clothmakers nearby. Bartholomew would bear watching.

  As would the man Tibb, or Thibault. Folk reacted in different ways to the presence of death, he knew, but Tibb’s giggle had sent a chill down his spine. The way his eyes had never stopped moving, from Maeve to Bartholomew to himself and back again. Tibb had been the only one to support Bartholomew’s accusation of Warin as well, and the only one not even to look at the corpse. Had he stayed back because of squeamishness or because he already knew what the body looked like?

  But the bawd had named Owen Hywel. He knew that name, but could not quite put a face to it. There were a fair number of Welshmen in the city, most of them settled in the Walmgate district close to the old Jewry. If Mistress Agnes were to be believed, the man was certainly a menace, and abusing a woman, even a maudlyn, was in Cordwainer’s mind one of the basest crimes a man could commit. He thought again of the young girl Gylfa with her tiny bared breast. May God have mercy, that was a hard life for a woman. Still, there was no proof that Hywel had killed Molly, just the bawd’s accusation.

  And what of the barefoot man? Twas a pity Thomas had been unable to track the footprints or to find Osbert. Although a grown man, Osbert had the mind of a child, and he was further deranged by a life of hunger and abuse on the streets of the city. He wouldn’t harm a soul, but Cordwainer was certain he had seen something if only he could be made to tell it clearly. And if the footprints weren’t Osbert’s, if a beggar poor enough to go shoeless in the snow had done the killing hoping to rob, there’d be little chance now of finding him. Cordwainer doubted that Molly had owned anything worth stealing – the bawd Agnes would have kept any valuables her maudlyns earned for herself.

  Then there was the golden crucifix. Twas possible that Molly had stolen the cross and the killer was trying to steal it again, but then why had he left it lying in the street? Had he been startled by someone, perhaps Osbert? But nay, there would have been time to go back. And why would Molly have carried it into the street with the pisspot? Cordwainer drew the cross from his scrip on the floor next to him and studied it, murmuring a brief prayer. Twas a pretty thing, if a depiction of a man tortured and nailed to a cross could be pretty. Twas also valuable: it gleamed reddish-gold in the candlelight and was heavy enough to be gold straight through. Gemstones winked at its top and bottom and on each end of the cross span, and there was a circlet of silver to attach it to a necklace or a rosary. It must belong to a nobleman or one of the wealthier clerical houses, but he had heard of no thefts. What was it doing in the mud of the Shambles next to a maudlyn’s body?

  He shook himself from his musings. Molly’s body was still lying at Saint Leonard’s spitalhouse in the care of the canons, awaiting the inquest and burial. “Thomas!” he bellowed. “Where in the name of God are you? We’re meant to be at Saint Leonard’s!”

  “In good time, Master,” replied Thomas, striding in from the kitchen wiping his lips on a square of linen. “I’ll just clear these things away and we shall go.”

  “Make haste, then, or twill be judgement day – “

  “Before we get there. I know.” Thomas scooped up the plate and cup with no discernible haste and returned the way he had come. Cordwainer could hear him clattering in the kitchen and then climbing up the stairs. He stood, leaning heavily on his stick. There was a carved and inlaid coffer on the shelf above the fireplace, an iron key resting in its lock. Placing the coffer on the table, he opened it and dropped the crucifix inside, quickly locked it again, and replaced the coffer on its shelf. He turned away from the fireplace and slipped the key into his scrip just as Thomas came back into the room carrying Cordwainer’s boots.

  “Please sit down, Master, and give me those house shoes,” said Thomas. “You’ll need your boots again today.”

  Cordwainer gave an exasperated snort and sat.

  2

  They set out into a day bright with the snow reflecting the sun’s glare, squinting their eyes and keeping their heads bowed as they made their way into a brisk wind up Micklegate and onto Ouse Bridge. The wind was stronger along the river, but it did not deter the shopkeepers and fishermen from setting out their wares for display in front of the houses and shops perched along the sides of the bridge itself, and the passageway was crowded with early-morning shoppers. There was a strong odor of river water and fish, overlaid by the stink of the public privy that emptied into the river below. Vendors cried their wares as they passed, sometimes stepping into their way or catching at their sleeves to extol the virtues of the morning’s catch. Cordwainer waved them away with his stick, snorting his impatience whenever someone ahead stopped to buy and blocked the street. When they had finally left the bustle on the bridge behind them, they continued up Ousegate to Petergate and, grateful that the wind was no longer in their faces, proceeded toward the great cathedral in Saint Peter’s liberty. Passing the guardhouse at the cathedral gate, they turned off onto Footless Lane towards Saint Leonard’s spitalhouse.

  They reached the spital precincts just as a crowd of destitute men and women were forming a ragged queue at the south gate to receive the daily alms distributed by the canons. The poor huddled in dispirited groups of two and three, their backs against the wind, waiting for the hard brown bread with soup poured into a hollow in the center that would for most be
their only food that day. Cordwainer scrutinized the group closely, but even the most tattered had something on their feet, if only rags wrapped tightly against the cold. A nearly toothless woman with sunken cheeks and rheum-filled eyes opened her mouth to complain as they pushed their way in front of her, but stopped when she realized they could not have come for alms. As they continued to the front of the queue, Cordwainer examined every ravaged face. Osbert was not among them.

  Together they edged their way past the almoner with his ladle to the gate itself and entered the spital grounds when the porter waved them through. As they passed the large infirmary on their left, they could hear an infant wailing from the low undercroft where abandoned or orphaned children were housed. Heedless of the frigid wind, several small boys played in the snow near the doorway, their shrieks of laughter bringing a nun in a dark brown habit and clean white wimple out of the door to shoo them farther from the building. On the upper floors, Cordwainer knew, were two hundred and six beds for the sick and dying. He himself had endowed one of them, giving him the right to nominate one person to be cared for – a decision he had always left to the good canons and sisters of Saint Leonard’s. Perhaps, he thought irritably, I could nominate myself for an hour or two if this leg doesn’t stop hurting. He stopped and rubbed ineffectually at his hip, where the pain was greatest.

  “Are you all right, Master?” asked Thomas in a low voice.

  Cordwainer grunted and waved him on. The pain was a constant in his life, more irritating than acute. Stefan had recommended frequent rests and hot poultices, but a man needed to be out and about. Father Martin had counseled him to bear the pain meekly, so that it might become a shield for him against the sin of pride. Although Cordwainer knew the priest was right, meekness did not come easily.

  He sighed and followed Thomas up a well-trodden path edged with stones that led from the infirmary to the chapel. Someone had obviously attempted to clear the snow away, but the gusty wind had foiled their efforts in places and it was necessary to watch his footing. He stopped again to catch his breath. When had walking against the wind become such hard work? Beyond the chapel he could see the well-maintained wooden dormitory that housed the college of Augustinian canons, and a smaller but no less well-kept building for the nuns. Behind them, Cordwainer knew, lay the gardens and fields that, along with a brewery, bakehouse, and apothecary, allowed the hospital liberty to be almost self-sufficient. A group of four lay brothers approached, and the men exchanged greetings. “If you would,” Cordwainer said, “I need to speak with the physician Stefan de Vale. Would you ask him to meet us in the chapel?”