The Elixir of Death

by Bernard Knight

  'The corpse is just a bit farther on,' promised the bailiff, pointing to a swath of trees along the steep side of the western bank. A few minutes later, they saw a small group of men waiting for them, some recognisable as having been at the inquest in Ringmore. Sliding gratefully from their horses and rubbing their aching bottoms, John and his officer followed Vado into the wood, where gnarled and spindly trees, most covered with grey-green lichen and moss, gave the lonely place a mystical air.

  They followed a faint track through the fallen leaves, the river still visible down to their left, until they reached an area where the trees were more widely spaced. Here they came upon a grotesque and pathetic sight which was even more weird than their imaginations had led them to expect.

  Hanging by the neck from a branch of an old oak was a thin, naked body. There was a slight breeze and the corpse turned eerily from side to side as if scanning the scenery with open, sightless eyes. It was not very high above the ground, the feet hovering barely a yard over the remains of a small fire, where the unburnt ends of a ring of small logs projected from a heap of grey ash.

  As with Peter le Calve, the arms were kept outstretched by being lashed by the wrists to a length of dead branch passing behind the shoulders, though there were also lashings around each armpit to keep the branch in place. Again like the dead manor-lord, the chest was disfigured by stab wounds, though this time they were many more in number. There were also some on the belly, dribbles of dried blood streaking the skin below each stab.

  For a moment, the new arrivals stared in silence at the horrific scene.

  'At least he's not been disembowelled or castrated,' grunted Gwyn, as if this were something to the dead man's advantage.

  'But he's just as bloody dead!' snarled de Wolfe. 'Poor old sod. Why do this to a harmless hermit?'

  There was no answer to this, and they moved nearer for a closer look.

  John noticed some scraps of part-burned cloth at the edge of the dead fire.

  'That must be the remains of his clothing,' he grunted. 'Even in death they had to further humiliate the old man by stripping him naked!'

  Gwyn was looking up rather than down, and nudged his master.

  'No need to ponder if this is connected with Shillingford, Crowner! Look at those lashings and the cord around his neck.'

  The coroner followed his officer's gaze and nodded. 'More red silk. And I'll wager two marks that those stab wounds are far wider than usual.'

  De Wolfe felt nauseated by the evil nature of this killing. Though he had seen far worse mutilations in battle, this cold-blooded perversity both sickened and infuriated him.

  'Cut the poor old devil down!' he snapped. 'He's suffered enough indignity.'

  As Gwyn and Osbert the reeve supported the frail body, one of the younger men shinned up the tree and clambered out along the branch to cut through the thin but strong cord that was knotted over it.

  'We left him there for you to see, Crowner,' said William Vado apologetically. 'There were those in the village who said it wasn't seemly to leave him hanging for two days, but in the circumstances I thought I'd best abide by your rules.'

  'It's a dilemma, with Exeter so far away,' admitted John, with uncharacteristic sympathy. 'But you did right, Bailiff, we need all the information we can get to catch these bastards.'

  'But where do we start?' growled Gwyn pessimistically. 'Have any strangers been seen around here?' demanded John of the bailiff.

  Vado shook his head. 'This is a lonely spot, sir. Even the river fishermen rarely come up from the water's edge. Who's to see any strangers?'

  They paused as Gwyn and the reeve went forward to gently take the victim's body as the lad finished cutting through the silken cord. The old hermit was laid on the ground away from the fire, and one of the men took off his ragged cape and laid it over the anchorite's body, a simple act of compassion that was not lost on the coroner.

  'When was he last seen alive?' he asked.

  'I saw him the day before he went missing,' volunteered one of the fishermen. 'About noon, it was. He was up on the top of his hut, looking out to sea. He does that for us, scanning the water for shoals.'

  'Why should he be here?' boomed Gwyn. 'I was wondering whether he was brought here forcibly or whether he was ambushed.'

  'Old Joel used to wander the woods looking for fallen branches for his fire,' said the reeve. 'I know this was one of the places he came for that.'

  De Wolfe looked around as if for inspiration, but all he saw was the silent trees. If only they could speak, he thought whimsically.

  'There are no horse tracks here. Whoever did this must have come on foot,' observed the bailiff.

  'No mysterious hooded monks this time?' said John bitterly. This was a mystery with no clues, as far as he was concerned. They watched as the youth with the knife cut the cords holding Joel's arms to the crucifying branch and allowed the dead limbs to be pushed against his side.

  'The death stiffness is passing off,' said Gwyn. 'That fits with him dying more than a couple of days ago.' He knelt down alongside the pathetic figure of the old man and gently pulled back the cape to look at Joel's face and trunk. The coroner came to bend over him, hands on knees.

  'He didn't die of hanging, anyway,' commented John. 'His face isn't discoloured and there's no swelling around the cord on his neck.'

  'Doesn't have to be like that, though I agree it usually is,' said Gwyn, unwilling to be overshadowed in his knowledge of violent death, even by his master.

  De Wolfe pointed to some of the stab wounds, which, as he had prophesied, were seen on closer inspection to be very wide.

  'The blood dribbling from some of them show he was lying down when they bled, not hanging from a tree.' This time even Gwyn failed to argue, just nodded his head. He turned the body over and looked at several similar wounds on the back.

  'Ten wounds all told, including those on his belly. Only one is needed to kill, so why inflict all these?'

  'Does that mean the killers were in some sort of frenzy?' asked the bailiff.

  John shrugged. 'Could be - though I've known of some cruel bastards stabbing a man many times just for the pleasure of it.'

  Gwyn collected up the cut cords and stuffed them into the shapeless pouch on his belt. 'I'll keep these to add to the others. You never know, maybe we can match them with something if we catch these swine.'

  There seemed nothing further to do in the wood, so John told Vado that they would take the body back to Ringmore.

  'This is in your manor, I presume?' he asked, looking around.

  The bailiff nodded. 'Only just. The boundary with Bigbury is over there.' He waved a hand vaguely. 'No use expecting them to do anything, anyway! They don't have a resident bailiff, he's in Aveton - and their reeve is a drunken idiot.'

  They set off through the trees in the opposite direction to which they had come, moving down the side of the estuary towards the sea. The path was narrow and they had to thread their way through the trees, leading their horses by the reins. When they came out of the woods, it was about noon and the tide was in, so John's intention to go on to Burgh Island to look at Joel's hermitage was frustrated. They rounded the point and were able to mount their horses again for the mile or so to the village, leaving the others to tramp in their own time with the skinny body, which four men carried between them, a limb each.

  In the old manor-house of Ringmore, William Vado soon organised food and drink and afterwards they sat around the fire-pit in rather muted mood, saddened by the apparently senseless murder of a penniless recluse.

  'How long has this Joel been here?' asked Gwyn. 'Since I was a child, and that's more than twenty years ago,' answered William. 'I don't remember him coming.' The reeve, Osbert de Newetone, was a decade older and recalled Joel's arrival.

  'He just walked into the village one day. Autumn, it was, a real good harvest year. He wore a plain tunic and a pilgrim's hat, was bare-foot and carried a pilgrim's staff. He kept those clothes for years u
ntil they fell to pieces. Then someone in the village gave him the cast-offs he wore to this day.'

  'And you know nothing of where he came from?' persisted the coroner.

  The bailiff turned up his hands. 'He never said and it wasn't our place to ask. But he spoke well, and he could read words on parchment when someone needed to. I don't remember where this story came from about him being a former nobleman or knight, but I could quite believe it.'

  'How did he come to settle on that island?' queried

  Gwyn, sucking ale from his moustache.

  'When he arrived, he said he was a looking for a place of solitude to live out his life, praise God and atone for his sins,' said Osbert. 'The loneliest place we could think of was the island of St Michael de la Burgh. Our priest said there was no reason to object, so off he went and built that hut.'

  Further questioning produced nothing useful, and when they had finished their ale and warmed up by the fire, John and Gwyn reluctantly shrugged on their riding capes and followed the local men outside, where the overcast sky was threatening snow or sleet, though at the moment it was dry, but with a biting east wind.

  As they trudged up the road, John turned to the bailiff. 'I suppose your Father Walter will have housed the corpse in the barn again,' he said cynically.

  To his mild surprise, Vado shook his head. 'When I told him what had happened, he said that as a solitary hermit and a man of God, he was entitled to be laid before the altar until we buried him.'

  When they got to the tiny church, they found that this was indeed the case. The mortal remains of Joel, draped in a rather grubby linen sheet which was probably a spare altar-cloth, lay on a rough bier in the centre of the square room where God was worshipped in Ringmore.

  'We'll have to carry him out for the inquest,' said John. 'It's not seemly to expose his wounded body to the jury in here.' It was too cold and windy to hold the formalities in the churchyard, so a couple of men carried the corpse table by its handles over to the tithe barn.

  Most of the men from the village, together with a few fisherfolk from the beach, formed an audience and a jury. John and Gwyn went through the usual routine, but when the coroner came to determine 'Presentment of Englishry', Father Walter interrupted him.

  'I would speak to you alone for a moment, Crowner,' he demanded in a tone that anticipated no refusal. John walked over to the doorway, where the sour-faced priest had been watching the proceedings with apparent indifference.

  'From what I saw at your last inquisition here, this 'presentment' business seems aimed at distinguishing Saxons from those of mainly Norman blood?'

  'It does indeed,' said de Wolfe. 'But in this case, his very name and the fact that he can read and write must indicate that he is unlikely to be a Saxon peasant.'

  The florid-faced priest nodded, the bags under his slightly bloodshot eyes sagging like those of some old bloodhound. He looked around at his flock in the barn and nudged John farther towards the open air, to be out of their hearing. 'I can certainly confirm that,' he said in a low voice. 'Now that he is dead, I am not so concerned about keeping too strictly to the sanctity of the confessional. At least I can tell you his true name and something of his origins.'

  The coroner waited expectantly. Any information would be welcome, rather than the void that seemed to surround these deaths.

  'He would have been seventy years old at his death, calculating from what he told me some years ago. Joel's full name was Sir Joel de Valle Torta, from a noble family with estates in Normandy and Essex. He had been a Knight Templar many years earlier.'

  De Wolfe uttered a low whistle of surprise. 'A Templar! Usually, once a Templar, always a Templar. How came he to be living in obscurity on a rock stuck in the sea?'

  'I cannot reveal much of the detail, even after his death. But he said that his sins weighed so heavily upon him that he received a special dispensation to leave the Order to become an anchorite, cutting himself off from the world.'

  'Then his sins must indeed have been unusually vile! Can you tell me what they might have been? It may have a bearing upon his murder.'

  Father Waiter pondered for a moment, as if communing with some higher authority - which he may well have been doing.

  'It must suffice to say that it concerned his behaviour as a soldier. He came to confession regularly and it was always the same lament - his overwhelming guilt for his own actions in warfare. He was ever penitent and sought absolution. '

  The coroner instinctively felt that this was important in understanding the man's death, so he pressed the parish priest harder.

  'In which campaigns would he have served? There were bloody episodes in so many, from Ireland to Jerusalem. '

  Then he had a sudden thought. 'But he has been here for over twenty years, so he could not have been with us in the last attempt in the Holy Land. Acre was the place where so many men have had cause for guilty consciences over the foul deeds that took place there.'

  The heavily built vicar grunted. 'All I can tell you is that the cause of his anguish was indeed in Outremer - but long ago, for he was at the Second Crusade. That's all I know - at least, that's all I can tell you.'

  The way his fleshy lips clamped shut indicated that no amount of persuasion would make him say more, but John was satisfied - though still mystified.

  'The Second Crusade! The link that joins all these deaths!' he murmured.

  As Father Walter swung away with an air of finality, John went back to complete the short inquest. Though it displayed the usual frustrating pattern of the previous enquiries into this series of killings, he left Ringmore with much to think about and to discuss with Thomas and Gwyn.

  Two days later, the trio were breaking their fast in the cheerless room above the gatehouse in Exeter's castle. The cathedral bell was tolling for Prime, just before the eighth hour of the morning, and Gwyn was finishing a pork pasty, before tackling his bread and cheese.

  Thomas had not long come from his early chantry Mass and was sitting at the table, preparing a palimpsest, a second-hand sheet of parchment. After scraping off the original writing, he was sanding and chalking it, ready to write a record of the Ringmore inquest, whenever the coroner was ready to dictate. But John was in a contemplative mood as he chewed on a strip of dried salt beef, which looked like leather. At least it gave him a thirst, which he quenched at intervals from a pint pot sitting in front of him.

  'Thomas, you are a man of considerable intellect. Give us the benefit of that sharp mind of yours!'

  The little clerk was unsure whether his master was being complimentary or sarcastic, but decided on the former. His peaky face creased into a smile of pride.

  'On what, exactly, Crowner? , he asked, putting aside his parchment and rubbing his thin fingers together to rid them of the chalk dust.

  'We have three dead men and one more injured, the only connection between them that I can see being the Second Crusade. Peter le Calve's father and this Templar, Joel, were actually there - and the steward of Shillingford and the injured son were part of the le Calve household. Is that just a coincidence, Thomas?'

  The clerk pursed his lips in thought, but before he could reply, Gwyn interrupted.

  'This damned Second Crusade - before my time. What was it all about?'

  The teacher in Thomas leapt to the challenge. 'Giving such numbers to Crusades is unrealistic, really. God's war against the enemies of Christ goes on all the time - there's always fighting somewhere against the unbelievers. But yes, the ones where kings and princes get involved - or there's a major disaster - they tend to get numbered.'

  'All I've ever heard is that this second one was a disaster, right enough,' grunted the Cornishman.

  'Many of those who set off from the West never reached the Holy Land, as far as I remember,' said the coroner. 'Didn't they go off marauding on the way? And many more were wiped out on the journey?'

  Thomas nodded energetically, his great store of knowledge bursting to be free. 'Many of the German army never
even got out of Europe - they found wars to fight and cities to loot on the way.'

  'What's this got to do with our killings here?' muttered Gwyn suspiciously.

  'If this old Crusader, Joel, was so conscience-ridden that he sat on Burgh Island for twenty years, he must have been involved in something really bad,' observed John. 'What happened that could have been so awful? Something like Acre in the last Crusade?'

  Thomas tapped his fingers excitedly on the trestle table. 'Damascus! I'll wager it was Damascus.'

  The other two waited, impressed by their clerk's grasp of history, recently enlarged by his readings in the cathedral library.

  'That's what caused the Crusade to collapse, the last straw in a catalogue of mistakes. Two kings answered the call to arms by Pope Eugenius and St Bernard of Clairvaux after the Mohammedans captured the city of Edessa. One was Louis of France and the other Conrad of Germany.'

  'Didn't the English turn out for that one?' asked Gwyn.

  'The country was too concerned with civil war then, between Stephen and Matilda. Quite a big English contingent set off from Dartmouth, but stopped for months in Portugal to kick out the Moors. That was about the only successful campaign in the whole Crusade.'

  'So what's this about Damascus?' snapped de Wolfe. 'It was the final fiasco, both political and military. The two kings decided to besiege it, but their forces were so depleted and their tactics were so bad that they had to abandon the attempt after only three days. In their humiliating retreat, they inflicted terrible revenge and bloodshed on the surrounding inhabitants. I suspect that was the most likely source of the hermit's guilt.'

  'This was all of forty-seven years ago,' objected Gwyn. 'None of us was even born then.'