The Butcher of St Peter's: (Knights Templar 19)

by Michael Jecks

  ‘Him? Hmm. But the corollary is, if you’re right, that he would kill any man who attempted to beat or hurt one of his women. He feels he owns them, they are his investment. He wants them to behave in the way he expects, and he wants them to remain here. He’ll look after them like his own children, provided they do what he wants.’

  ‘And then throw them away like garbage,’ Baldwin summed up for him. ‘Ralph, a man who can do that to a girl must not be allowed to keep the brothel. He has done it to this one … what if he did the same to another? What if he did the same to Betsy? Yes, to her, Ralph.’

  He stood. Ralph was sitting pensively now, a small frown wrinkling his brow.

  ‘Think on it, Ralph, and then go and speak to Betsy. Find out who it is who owns her and the other girls there. And then tell Sir Peregrine. I would not have another girl die.’

  ‘What of you? Should I not tell you?’

  ‘Ach!’ Baldwin pulled a face and felt his shoulder. ‘I think that I have done enough already. My shoulder, as you keep telling me, needs rest. I shall ride home today and leave all these affairs in the hands of those who actually have responsibility for them. It’s no longer my business.’

  Jordan was home at a little before lunch, and as he walked inside he saw his wife sitting waiting for him. She stood as soon as he came in through the door, and went to help him with his cotte.

  ‘Get me an ale,’ he rasped. ‘My throat is parched. Christ’s cods, the way those arses talk you’d think there was a tax on silence.’

  She obediently hurried out to the buttery. Usually their bottler should have been there to serve him, but Jordan had sent the man away to replenish their stocks, and he had taken the cart down to Topsham a little after Jordan and she had broken their fasts. He wouldn’t be back for a long time.

  Jordan watched her go sombrely. The matter of Daniel’s death was all over the city, and several men had been glancing at him askance as though they were wondering. It didn’t matter, though. He’d been at the South Gate brothel with two merchants. They were both of them unmarried, so neither would worry too much about their presence there becoming known, and Jordan didn’t care who learned he’d been lying with a whore. That was his protection. He couldn’t have been present when Daniel was murdered. He hadn’t been.

  Still, some men were asking who else would wish to see him dead, and he was unhappy with the sidelong looks and suspicious stares. The city’s receiver this morning had refused to sit near him and hadn’t shaken hands with him. Nor had the clerk. If those two took it into their heads that he might have paid someone else to kill Daniel, it could go hard for him. God, he was thirsty! ‘Where are you, bitch?’

  Mazeline shivered at his voice. The barrel was almost empty, and she had to lift the end to pour a little more from the bottom. It meant that there was more sediment in the jug than usual, but she could do little about that. Taking it back into the room, she set the drink down with his favourite goblet in front of him on his table, and asked if he’d like some cold meat or a pie.

  ‘Meat, woman. Bring it out quickly, I’m hungry. Where’s Jane?’

  ‘Playing at the Bakeres’ house.’

  She saw him nod approvingly. Jane didn’t like the Bakeres’ little boy – she said he was loud, rough, and bullying – but Mazeline knew that her husband approved of the Bakeres because Master Billy Bakere was a rising force within the Freedom of the city. In that exclusive club it was as well to keep an ear to the ground, and Jordan had heard that Billy might soon be the city’s official receiver, in charge of all the city’s money. That would make him a worthwhile friend, so Jane had been told to play with his son at every opportunity.

  The meat was ready with some bread sliced on a trencher, and she brought them through to the table. He watched her as she approached the table and set the food down, and then, as she took a pace back, he swept up his goblet and hurled it at her.

  ‘This tastes of shit! Are you trying to poison me?’

  The heavy pewter rim struck her above the eye, cutting the flesh on the point of the bone, and dashing the ale all over her. There had been a good two-thirds of a pint, and it exploded from the goblet, drenching her hair and upper body.

  She stood for a moment, and the urge to burst into tears was so overwhelming, she felt certain she must succumb, but the expression on his face stopped her. She recognized that look. He was waiting for her to react.

  When they had first been married, each time he had lost his temper she had been sure that it was a brief aberration, not a proof of his true character. She knew now that she had been fooling herself. This man was not a kindly lover such as young maids dreamed of and hoped to marry. Mazeline had been unfortunate in her choice of husband.

  She had realized that the first time she had provided him with a meal that was late. She had explained that it was not her fault, that the cook had bought some flesh that was already too old and that it was unfit for him, so she had gone to buy some fresh meat from the fleshfold.

  He had listened, very calm and collected, and then he had explained coolly that he was providing money for her to feed him, and if she was unable to provide even that service, she had no use. And then he had gripped her wrists and held her while he took a rope and studied it carefully, weighing it in his hand. The hemp was heavy, almost an inch thick, and he beat her so violently that she had been sick on the floor in front of him. Although the rope had not cut her skin as badly as, later, the plaited leather switch would, the weight of the rope bruised her dreadfully, and she had been incapable of lying on her back. Later that night, her protests were ignored, though. A wife had two duties, he explained, to provide food and then to bed her man. She had failed in one, but she wouldn’t fail in the second. While she wept and groaned in pain, he thrust and moaned lustfully above her, and probably from that moment she had truly begun to hate him.

  It was a strange feeling to give birth to this man’s offspring. At first the idea of a child was repulsive, as repellent as taking him between her thighs and permitting him to enter her, but then, when the child arrived, she realized that this little babe was part of her too, and as soon as Jane first opened her eyes and looked up at Mazeline she knew that she loved her. They would love each other, despite all that the world could throw at them; against her husband, Jane’s father, they would unite for each other’s support.

  And so life had progressed, at first. Jane was entirely dependent upon her mother, as all children must be, and Mazeline was able to perform her duties to her husband’s satisfaction while still feeding and watching over this new life which was so entwined about her own. She adored their little baby, longing for those moments when the child would suckle. And as Jane grew larger and larger on her milk, so Mazeline looked forward more urgently to holding her to feed, up until the time when Jane was just over two years old, when she suddenly rejected the breast. Mazeline still looked on that date as the beginning of her misery, because it seemed to her that it was then that Jane first began to look to her father for everything, rather than Mazeline. Mazeline had never felt so lonely as she did in the days after that initial rejection.

  But there was little she could do now to retrieve her daughter’s love. This man had stolen that, just as he had taken her pride. It was in order to gain some affection, to try to renew some confidence in herself, that she had allowed herself to be seduced by Reg. Not that she could ever tell Jordan that he was being cuckolded. Some men might flash into a rage and kill their spouse and her lover on hearing that she had been unfaithful, but Mazeline knew full well that her own man would not merely kill.

  Taking a lover was dangerous, as she knew. But at least Reg faced the same danger in taking her. Either of them could be murdered by her man for their infidelity. With any luck, Jordan would never know of their secret trysts. Just now, with the ale dripping down her face and trickling from her nose and chin, mingling with the blood from her eyebrow, she didn’t care. It felt to her as though at least for the last few weeks she had be
en loved by a man for whom she could feel affection.

  Poor Reg. In the street yesterday he had seemed so shocked to see the other bruises. She only hoped she could save him from seeing her like this: so forlorn and destroyed. There was nothing left of her self-respect. All her life was pointless, other than Reg’s love. And her hatred for her husband.

  ‘You should go and dress that scratch,’ he said.

  She remained standing where she was a moment. There was no affection or shame in his tone. She had failed him, so he had corrected her. That was an end to the matter. He knew nothing of guilt. Guilt was for weaklings, he had once said.

  It was the knock at the door that made her move at last. She drew her eyes from him and went to the door, ashamed to be seen like this, but knowing that she must go. He would not tolerate her leaving the door unanswered, and he wouldn’t go to it himself. That was a woman’s work when his bottler was away.

  ‘Mistress,’ Agnes said, looking her up and down with some surprise. ‘Is your husband here?’

  Mazeline was so filled with hatred, she could not speak, but merely pointed, and then stood staring after this latest woman to have stolen her man’s love from her.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Baldwin had hardly left his hall when Ralph received the call from his neighbour.

  It was some months since he had moved here, and in that time he had assiduously tried to foster good relations with the others not only in his own street, but in the castle and in Goldsmith’s Street too. In those three places was much of the secular wealth of the city, and it was crucial that he should be on favourable terms with all the people who lived there. After all, a physician might spend the same time and effort on a beggar as on a lord – the difference was, the lord could pay better.

  At first, he wondered who she might be, and then, when she was announced, he immediately thought of the attractive woman who lived down the road. From memory, Mazeline le Bolle was delightful, with flashing eyes and high cheeks framed by very dark hair, but today she was all but unrecognizable. She stank of ale, and some still dripped from her sodden tunic, while her hair was bedraggled and matted, clinging to her face and throat. Blood was seeping thickly from a long cut over her right eye, and the left was coloured with the after-effects of a punch, easily identifiable by a physician who had experience of the stews. In the case of Betsy or one of the other girls he’d have assumed she had been attacked by a client; a charitable man might have thought that the wife of a notable member of the community had been assaulted by some felon in the street – but Ralph was not a charitable man. He had seen enough of violence to know that most married women who arrived at his door with cuts and bruises had not needed to leave their own houses to win them.

  From the look of her, she was not yet recovered, and Ralph immediately set about putting her at her ease. He brought up a chair, muttering pompously about good-for-nothing servants who never bothered to help when an honoured guest arrived, and then called loudly for his bottler, hissing at him from the doorway to fetch a little of his burned wine. He bought this strange liquor especially for clients who needed refreshment to calm their nerves. It was rare and expensive, and he had to buy it from the monks at Buckfast, but it was worth its weight in gold.

  It worked well this time. The bottler, who like most of Ralph’s servants was well acquainted with the specific requirements of the physician’s trade, waited at the door for Ralph to collect the tray, rather than entering immediately. Ralph put a large measure into a mazer for her, reckoning that a large sycamore bowl was safer in shaky hands than a gold or silver goblet. He passed it to her, and looked away while she sipped the warming drink. From experience he knew that it would take a few moments for the drink to take effect, and when he heard the first sniffle he turned to her and studied her again.

  Yes, he knew her. She was wife to that man three doors along the road, the big, bluff fellow who was always the first to buy wine in the tavern. Jordan le Bolle. The man Sir Baldwin de Furnshill suspected of involvement in organized prostitution, and possibly the attacks on Anne and Mick. This was his woman, and usually a marvellous-looking lady at that. She too had plainly been attacked, although not seriously in his estimation. There were no obvious lacerations in her breast or on her hands to indicate defence against a knife attack. Nothing like that. But she had suffered a lot of ill-treatment, clearly. The poor woman looked as though she had been forced to endure a great deal of torture over some weeks.

  ‘You cannot find decent staff, can you?’ he essayed with a bright smile, which faded quickly as she burst into tears.

  ‘It was a little hurtful, I confess,’ Baldwin said as Jeanne and Edgar packed up their few belongings. ‘I had hoped that my assistance might be desirable to the good Coroner.’

  ‘“Good Coroner”?’ Jeanne repeated with a raised brow. ‘Your tone has changed towards him, husband. Is this not the man you thought of as a mere political agent, dangerous to know and still more dangerous to befriend?’

  ‘Well, that is as may be,’ Baldwin responded a little huffily. ‘But he has not tried to force his opinions down my throat, nor has he attempted to persuade me that treachery to the King is justified. It is strange, though, because I thought he would do so – he tried to bring up the subject almost as soon as he first saw us here, if you remember.’

  ‘Perhaps it was your subtle refusal to discuss anything of the kind?’ Jeanne said mockingly.

  ‘I was intentionally blunt.’

  ‘Rude,’ Edgar corrected from the far end of the room.

  ‘When I want your opinion, I shall ask for it,’ Baldwin declared loftily.

  ‘Anyway, it was after he saw that widow that he lost interest in politics,’ Edgar continued imperturbably.

  ‘You think so?’ Jeanne asked. ‘Could he be chasing a new lover?’

  ‘He could be,’ Baldwin considered. ‘If he is, it is sad.’

  ‘Why sad?’

  ‘Because he has had misfortune with women before.’

  She nodded. Both had been in Tiverton when his last woman had died in childbirth.

  ‘So,’ he continued. ‘What worse for him than a woman who has recently been widowed and is still in mourning? She will be unattainable for some while to come, if she wants to honour her dead husband.’

  There was a moment’s silence as they considered this, and then Jeanne sighed. ‘I could feel quite sorry for him. If there is a chance that he could be happy with that woman, I wish him all good fortune in his wooing.’

  ‘If it keeps him off the subject of politics and leaves me in peace I’ll happily pay for the wedding breakfast myself,’ Baldwin muttered drily. ‘For that I’d be willing to give freely.’

  Edgar grinned as Jeanne shook her head and tutted impatiently. She returned to her packing.

  There was little enough to worry about. Mostly it was a few clothes, some shirts and a clean tunic with some better quality hosen for Baldwin, in case he had to attend a court while he was here in Exeter. All had been sent on by messenger after his wounding, and most of it had not been used. Still, she was content. Soon they would be home. The peasant woman would be there, of course, but Jeanne felt a little better able to cope with the sight of her than she had a day or two ago. Yes, she was sure that she could manage to see the maid without growing too angry.

  And her man did look happier, she thought. Baldwin seemed easier in his own mind now that he had given up this investigation. He needed rest, and as soon as they arrived home that was what he would get whether he liked it or not. Baldwin would be comfortably installed in a chair in the warm hall near their fire, and he would stay there until Jeanne felt he was better. No interruptions, no courts, nothing. Just rest.

  She had just reached this conclusion when there came a knock at the door and she felt her heart lurch, as though she knew that this boded ill for her plans.

  Estmund drank a little more of the ale and belched, but there was no comfort in it. He had come here to the Duryard, as Henry h
ad urged, to be away from the Coroner during the inquest, in order to escape arrest, but what had he escaped to? He was looked on as a felon now, for not turning up to the Coroner’s court, and how could matters improve? While he was hiding, everyone would assume he was as guilty as Henry did. There was no escape, not while he lived in Exeter.

  Henry had told him he ought to go. Yes, but where? He knew nowhere other than Exeter. This was his city. Here was where he had been born, where he’d been taught, where he’d been apprenticed and qualified as a butcher, where he’d loved, married, and conceived his child before burying the baby girl and his wife. To leave this place would be like leaving his own soul. He couldn’t do it!

  He hadn’t done anything, anyway. Not on purpose. He’d just been there as usual, and then Daniel ran at him and …

  He’d always loved the innocence of children. It was there in their faces as they lay in their beds just as it was when they were at rest or at play. He loved it, the way that they would focus on whatever most attracted them to the exclusion of all else, but better was the look of peace on their faces while they were sleeping. That was what he had always loved most.

  Emma had always said that children were the hope of the world. When there were rumours of war with the murderous Scots, or the mad Welsh, or the Irish, Emma always said that it was the children who must be protected because they could make the world safer for everyone. If men could only learn from the sweetness of little children, everyone would be happier, she used to say. And wars might end.

  At those times Est had laughed at her, amused to think that she could be so innocent. While men lived, they would fight. Everyone knew that.

  He felt … he was almost sure that in those days life had been clearer. There had been less confusion in his mind. He had been able to concentrate more easily; he knew what he wanted. First his own shop in the fleshfold, then his wife, and finally a family, and he had managed to win all three. He hoped later to join the Freedom and enjoy the privileges that would give him. In those days, such a long time ago, he’d thought he would be one of the wealthiest men in the city before long.