‘Why then is he a fool now? Did he have an accident? A blow to his head?’
‘Nothing like that. Poor fellow, he married quite young. Must have been ten years ago now, back in the sixth year of the reign of the King.’
Baldwin calculated. King Edward II came to the throne in 1307, so Est’s marriage was in 1313 or 1314. ‘Yes?’
‘They were obviously happy, and soon after, they were blessed. Emma, she was his wife, and a lovely girl. There was a lot of jealousy about when he caught her. Anyway, she fell pregnant a year or so after their marriage and they couldn’t have been more delighted, the pair of them. He was running his own business by then, and making good money, so when the baby was born in 1314, about the month of July or August, I remember, all seemed well. Except you never can tell, can you? You never know what’s round the corner.’
All the men sitting at that table knew well enough what had happened next, though. It was the great famine, the terrible time when everyone had friends or family who had died.
‘Yes, well, here in Exeter, we got it worse than most, I reckon. There was hardly a soul hadn’t lost someone. Well, you all remember it. Est, he fared worse than some, but it affected him badly. First his little baby girl died, only a year or so old, she was. So many of the little ones did. They couldn’t feed properly and their mammies couldn’t give them pap, so that was it for them. The little mite faded over a few days, and then was gone.
‘Est himself could have coped with that, I dare say, but then they couldn’t bury the little chit on consecrated ground. It had been a hard birth, and the midwife thought Cissy wouldn’t live, so she baptized the babe herself.’
‘That’s acceptable,’ Baldwin commented.
‘Normally, but this woman was no good. She just mumbled some nonsense about “God and Saint John bless this body and these bones,” and that was it. No one thought about it until Cissy was dead, and then it was too late. The priest told the midwife she’d consigned little Cissy to eternal suffering. The soul was lost. That was why Est’s wife lost the will to live, I reckon. He never got over the horror of burying his child. Then he lost her too, and in the worst way. She hanged herself. I was there with the jury when the Coroner heard the case. A bad business, a terrible business.’
Saul stopped and picked up his ale. He sat staring into it so long that Baldwin thought he was demanding a fresh quart, and was debating whether to order one for him when he realized that Saul was staring through the ale into the past.
Much of what he saw there was unpleasant. Saul could remember the carts carrying the dead to the cemetery, the houses with the shutters wide even at night because the whole family had died and been taken away. Burial pits dug by the fossors to encompass entire households, for when the food was gone there was nothing to be done. Women might whore for a few pennies, men might sell all their prized possessions, but when all wanted the same scarce goods – foods – the prices of bread and grain rose as those of silver, pewter and gold fell. No one could eat metal.
Even in Exeter there were murders, and once there had been a suggestion that a man had broken that ancient taboo: cannibalism. But stories of that nature abounded when all were so desperate. When a man was prepared to boil his boots for the sustenance the leather might hold, you knew that the fellow was starving.
‘Everyone suffered,’ Saul said quietly. ‘I lost a brother and a child, although my second son – God be praised! – lived. And now he’s a bone idle arse with turds for brains … still, I’d not lose him too. One was bad enough. And Est lost both. His wife and his child. And neither could be buried on consecrated ground.’
‘It must have been very hard,’ Baldwin said. ‘But most people recovered. Why did not this fellow?’
Saul shrugged. He had no answer for that.
‘The parents, surely, should have realized and had the baby baptized?’ Sir Peregrine commented in a hushed tone. It was still a source of profound pain to him that he had not been able to ensure his still-born child’s burial in the churchyard as a baptized Christian. ‘No parent could fail that responsibility.’
‘There were too few priests to go round … they were not educated like some. They trusted the midwife. Later, when their baby was screaming all night and all day because she was so hungry, and they were desperately trying to feed her, they had other things on their minds,’ Saul said sharply. ‘Even the best of parents can fail, Sir Knight! These two were good parents.’
He hadn’t taken to this arrogant piece of piss. Tall he might be, with his fair hair and green eyes, but that didn’t impress Saul. Saul was a butcher, and as such he was used to lifting pig carcasses and half-oxen on his back, hoisting them onto tables or lifting them onto hooks. And when it came to swordplay, he had an eighteen-inch knife in his sheath now that would be more than a match for any man’s blade in a fight here in a darkened tavern.
The other one, though, he looked as though he understood suffering. Saul looked at him. ‘You were here in the famine, sir?’
Baldwin nodded. ‘Not here in Exeter, but up in Cadbury. We did not suffer so much as you down here, I think. Still, I have seen people starve to death. It is not a pleasant sight.’ In his mind’s eye he saw again the streets of Acre as the siege began to bite. The women and children lying in the streets, the decomposing heads of their husbands and fathers lying where they had bounced, obscene missiles hurled by the great engines of war outside. One woman had come across her only son’s head lying in the roadway, and then, a few paces on, her husband’s. The men had fought together, and must have died so near to each other that their enemies decapitated both at the same time and hurled their heads into the city together. It was an unbelievably cruel way for that woman to discover that her family was no more. He suddenly wondered what might have happened to her. Perhaps she too committed suicide. So many did in that terrible battle. Better to die unshriven than to wait for the Moors to come and take their sport. ‘So Estmund lost all, and then lost his mind?’
‘I think he would have come round. He was a sturdy fellow and capable of great courage and resilience, but then he was prevented from burying her in the graveyard.’
‘A cruel thing, but normal,’ Baldwin observed.
‘The tragedy was that an officer lost his temper when he saw Est digging a pit for his woman, and went and raged at him to stop. He’d heard that Est was not allowed to bury her in the cemetery, but Est and Henry Adyn were outside the consecrated area, and had been given permission to bury her there. When they refused to move, Est and Henry were attacked, and Henry was crippled for life.’
‘What happened to the corpse?’ Sir Peregrine asked.
There was a sudden burst of noise. Two friars had entered, and now the older, thinner of the two was declaiming, telling some story about the canons stealing a corpse. Baldwin glanced at them, annoyed at the intrusion into his thoughts. The older man was declaring that canons were all thieves, or some such nonsense. Baldwin shook his head and listened to Saul again. The friars had best be careful, or the Dean would hear.
‘They were allowed to bury her there later,’ Saul continued. ‘The city didn’t want her corpse lying in the street for too long. And Est was digging legally, just outside the sacred space. It was the officer who was in the wrong. Silly arse. He often was.’
Baldwin noted the use of the past tense and suddenly had an insight. ‘You mean that the officer was Daniel?’
‘Of course he was. But Est wouldn’t hurt him. I doubt whether he could!’
‘Perhaps not,’ Baldwin said, but he was considering the other: the man called Henry Adyn, who had been ferociously attacked and was still crippled.
Juliana looked terrible, Agnes thought as she walked in with Cecily and Arthur later that evening. Usually so bright and fresh-faced, she averted her gaze as the three entered the little chamber, and it was only with an apparent effort that she could turn and face them. Holding out her arms, she beckoned her children to her with a sweet smile that somehow fractured in
to despair even as her lips broadened welcomingly.
Yet still she hardly looked at Agnes.
On occasion Agnes had been called many names. Selfish was one of Juliana’s favourites, especially when Agnes had tried to share her doubts or fears with her younger sister, but it was no surprise. Juliana had no idea what it was like to be left alone, unwanted, unloved, with no protector to guard her … Agnes had only once thought she had found such a man, and what had happened? He had been stolen from her. Snatched just when Agnes was beginning to feel that she might be able to love him. It had been a cruel, vicious thing for a sister to do. And then, more recently, Daniel had evicted her from the home he had created with Juliana. Once more Agnes had lost everything. All she had was her lover.
Well, if Juliana had not appreciated how hurtful it was to lose Daniel all those years ago, she knew what it was like now, Agnes thought to herself. Not with satisfaction, of course. No, she wouldn’t want to bring any suffering to her sister. But there was a divine aspect to this retribution.
And still Juliana avoided her eye. It was too much after spending all the long day looking after her brats!
Jordan entered his house like a storm. The door crashed behind him as he crossed through the passage to the comfortable parlour at the back where he sat on his favourite stool and gazed outside at the little garden.
This was a good house. Not too large, not pretentious, and certainly not eye-catching enough to attract unwelcome attention. Especially since that overblown bladder of shit, Daniel, was gone. Ironic that a man like him should be slaughtered in his own home, in front of his wife and children! If there had been justice, he would have died miserable and alone, a long way from comfort or compassion.
Ah, well. It had been a good few days. First he had had the fun of cutting that disloyal bitch Anne until there could be no doubt in any man’s mind that she would never again play the whore, not here in Exeter, nor anywhere else. She was damaged too badly for any pander to want to take her in; then he had had more fun with that prickle, Mick. Useless piece of bird dropping! He’d thought he could pull the wool over Jordan’s eyes? Take away one of his women and set up on his own account somewhere, would he? The devil take his soul! Jordan was no cretin; he wasn’t born yesterday! He could see when he was being lied to, and when he listened at the window and heard Mick telling her how they’d live more happily away from the life of whoring and bullying, without fear of Jordan … and they’d tried to tell him that it was her mother who was ill … fools!
And then the delight of knowing that Daniel, his most consistent and persistent enemy over all these years, was also dead.
Jordan didn’t kill wantonly, and when he did, he rarely targeted officers of the law. No, there was little point. Usually it was easier to pay them to keep them off his back – although in Daniel’s case that hadn’t worked. For some reason, he’d always been determined to get something on Jordan. He had known of Jordan’s little plans and games almost as soon as Jordan thought of them, and soon, Jordan was convinced, the bastard would have caught up with him. Having him out of the way meant that Jordan had a clear run at things now.
He heard a door-latch, and recognized his daughter Jane’s tread. Now this was what life was truly about. His little girl was his pride and his delight. It was entirely to his wife’s credit that she had helped create this child of Jordan’s seed. ‘I’m in here, sweeting!’
There was a slow, thoughtful tread in the passage, and then his little girl stood surveying him in the doorway.
It was something he never understood about women. Men and boys would look at him and see a threat, a physical danger, a man who would hurt them with as much ease as he might crush a fly; women and girls tended to look at him as though he was a large, ungainly bear, with few sensible ideas in his head, but somehow comforting for all that. And in his daughter’s face there was often an expression of calm exasperation, as though she could scarcely understand how someone so ridiculous and clumsy could have sired her.
‘Father, where have you been?’ she demanded with all the seriousness of her six years.
‘I have to earn a living, little heart,’ he said. ‘You know I have to go out on business.’
‘Do you want to know what I’ve been doing?’ she asked, and began to talk of the games she had been playing with her nurse.
There was no defence against a little girl who wanted to take her father’s time. He couldn’t quite understand the idea of men and women loving each other, but this, the affection for a child who had sprung from his own loins, was different. She was all his, and entirely perfect in this foul world. She took his hand, squirmed her way into his lap, and began to tell him, with expansive hand-movements, about her day. Her utter self-absorption was a source of amusement to him, but if she wished to describe her doings to him, that was fine so far as he was concerned.
However, while she talked, only a small part of his mind was engaged with her prattle. Most of his thoughts were fixed on the house where Daniel had died. The place where Daniel’s widow would now be living alone with her children. There was some satisfaction in knowing that the danger posed by Daniel was removed – and if Juliana threatened to accuse him, he could still kill her and her children. It would be a great deal easier to do so now that her husband was dead.
As Jordan listened with half an ear to his daughter’s chatter, Estmund was thinking of Emma.
Such a lovely smile. That was what everyone said about her when they first met her. She had that sort of childishness about her. Like a girl who was only just a woman, with the slight clumsiness that came with youth, and the beauty of that wide, appealing, open, innocent smile.
‘Oh, God! Why did You …’
No, he couldn’t frame the question. There was no justice in God’s stealing her away. The priest had tried to explain that her act was sinful, that she was forever damned for her criminal decision to take her own life, but while he spoke all Est could see was the way the smile had faded over time, just as their child faded and died in front of their eyes. Est had lost a piece of himself when his only babe had breathed her last. A scrawny little bundle of bone and tight, starved flesh, she was part of him, and when she was buried a part of Est had died at the same time. He had thought nothing could possibly be worse than that dreadful emptiness.
And then Emma killed herself.
Ach, the horror of that night would never leave him. It never could. And now he longed so much for the family he had once possessed that he would sometimes go and see other folk’s. Not to hurt anyone, just to look. To see what his little darling girl might have been like now, had she lived. She would have been nine or so now. A little girl like that one of Daniel Austyn’s. Perhaps if Emma had lived, they might have made another child, a boy this time. He could be like that lad of Reginald Gylla’s – Michael. He was a good-looking little fellow. And then there was the Carters’ boy down in Stepcote Lane. All of them so perfect, especially in their sleep. He would go sometimes to look at them, just to watch them as they slept, so perfect, so beautiful, so unbearably alive and fit, when his own precious little petal was nothing now, only yellowish bones in the red soil of the cathedral’s yard, unbaptized, a soul wandering lost in the wilderness, never to find her way to Heaven …
‘Christ Jesus!’ he groaned, curling into a ball with the pain and grief. God had decreed this fate for him, and he had no idea what crime he could have committed which merited so unkind a punishment.
A priest had once told him that he shouldn’t be concerned, because those who suffered most on earth would be the first to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Est had looked at him in horror. What purpose would there be in his walking through those gates if he could never see his two loves? None.
There was a fresh sensation. It was like a lion’s claw in his belly, the nails raking his stomach from within, and the pain wouldn’t leave him. He had to eat something. He had felt this before; many times before. It began as a griping like this, and soon he would be curled
up on himself, unaware of anything but his grief. One day, perhaps, if he was brave enough, he would leave it a little too long, and his pain would overwhelm him, and at last he would leave this cruel world.
But not today. Today he needed food. Slowly, he unwrapped his arms from about his body and forced himself to stand. He was lonely, so lonely … and so scared.
He kept seeing the look in that little girl’s eyes as he ran away. It terrified him.
Chapter Eleven
‘How does he live? Does he beg?’ Sir Peregrine asked.
‘He has a house of his own, and he still works when he needs the money. I think that most butchers at the fleshfold use him often enough, and they’ll let him take a cut of meat to keep him going. But he can’t work all the time.’
‘What else does he do, then?’ Baldwin pressed him.
‘He walks and he mutters to himself,’ Saul said stolidly. ‘He has been wrecked by the loss of his wife.’
‘Is it he who has entered other men’s houses?’ Baldwin asked.
Saul looked away as though unwilling to respond, but then nodded. ‘Who else? He means no harm, though.’
‘He’s killed a man,’ Sir Peregrine grated.
‘Nah! That wasn’t Est killed Daniel.’
‘You have even told us why,’ Sir Peregrine said. ‘Because Daniel was arse enough to try to beat him when all he wanted was a patch of ground to bury his poor woman!’
Saul looked at him, but it was Baldwin who voiced his thoughts. ‘Why, though? Why wait all these years and suddenly attack the fellow just now?’
Saul nodded. ‘I know him well. All of us do. I found him in my place a couple of times. Last time, I sat down with him and gave him some wine. He didn’t speak, just wept silently. Not for himself, but for his daughter, I think.’
‘He wanted to rape your child and you let him stay there?’ Sir Peregrine asked, appalled.
‘I don’t know where you get ideas like that, Coroner,’ Saul said with quiet contempt. ‘Est is no rapist, nor is he a sodomite. He just wanted to see my lad. I think that the only peace he ever knows is when he sees healthy children sleeping. He can’t cope with them awake, but he is entranced by the sight of them asleep – and scared too.’
The Butcher of St Peter's: (Knights Templar 19) Page 14