The Sanctuary Seeker

by Bernard Knight

  The cathedral bell chimed in the distance and Gwyn reminded the coroner that other duties called.

  John called to the two men-at-arms loitering beyond the gate, ‘Take these prisoners to the castle and lock them up. Try not to lose them on the way.’ Then he and his men made their way back through the inn, and walked back along Butchers Row towards South Gate Street, dodged down Milk Lane and thrust through the throng of shoppers, porters, carts and animals that congested the narrow streets.

  ‘The hairy one will hang, no doubt,’ squeaked Thomas, crossing himself in anticipation as he scurried behind the two big men.

  ‘If Gwyn’s witnesses so testify at the inquest I’ll hand him into the tender care of my brother-in-law to appear before the royal justices who, no doubt, will condemn him.’

  ‘What about the boy?’ asked Gwyn.

  ‘Depends on the holy sister’s care – and her God’s will. If he dies, the boy hangs. If he survives a year and a day, the lad may only be charged with assault.’

  Thomas pondered this for a moment as they passed into the Serge Market, heading down to the South Gate. ‘So he’ll lie in gaol for a year?’ he asked, crossing himself again.

  John thought about this. ‘I think I’ll let him free, if he has a family to go surety for him. The best chance the injured man has of survival is if his assailant must provide for his care, for if he dies, so does the Saxon – at the end of a rope.’

  Gwyn was doubtful about this proposed leniency. ‘Let him out of the castle dungeon and he’ll vanish into the forest within the hour – or else claim sanctuary in a church.’

  John was philosophical. ‘He may prefer to gamble that the man will live, rather than become an outlaw. In any event, the city burgesses will be saved the expense of keeping another prisoner in the castle gaol.’

  Gwyn grunted. ‘Cheaper still to cut their throats or drop them in the river.’

  By now they were past Holy Trinity church and nearing the South Gate. A steady stream of townsfolk was converging on one of the main exits from the city, which led to the London and Winchester roads. They were not going far, only to the gallows site, which lay a few hundred yards outside the city walls. Beyond the gate, the road divided into Holloway and Magdalene Street, which skirted Southernhay, a wide strip of pasture, gardens and trees that lay on the slope below the town wall. The first part of the London road beyond Magdalene Street was known as Bull Hill and, after the few houses petered out, the hanging tree stood starkly at the side of the highway.

  It was a chillingly simple structure, just two stout posts twelve feet high, with a longer crossbar joining the upper ends. Nearby were several single posts with a short arm at the top, from which were suspended gibbets, hooped iron frames the size and shape of a body. Inside, the rotting remains of previously executed fellows wafted a foetid stench to remind the populace of their mortality and the wages of sin, which meant the theft of anything worth more than twelve pence.

  By the time that John de Wolfe and his party arrived, a crowd of a hundred or more was assembled around the gallows. Hangings were a popular diversion for those who had an hour to spare on Tuesdays and Fridays. It was a social occasion, where people could meet and gossip, even conduct business while waiting for the felons to be dispatched.

  Hawkers stood by with their trays of sweetmeats and fruit, yelling their wares at the matrons with babies at their breast. Old men and cripples fended off the children and urchins who dodged about, yelling and playing hide-and-seek in the bushes at the side of the road. Only when the moment of death approached did the crowd become silent, better to savour the vicarious thrill of a life extinguished in the final agony of strangulation.

  John disliked hangings, though he was not sure why this was. As he approached the foot of the empty gallows, he felt a vague unease. Violent death was so familiar to him that he gave it not a second thought – men mutilated on the field of battle had been part of his way of life for years, and he had killed more than his share with his own hands, sword, mace and dagger. Yet there was something about this cold-blooded ritual of snuffing out civilians that bothered him, irrational though he knew it to be. Justice must be done, examples must be made of miscreants or the whole fabric of society would tumble about their ears … and yet ...

  He shrugged the mood off and motioned to his clerk to set out his pen and ink on a nearby cart, which would be used to turn off the condemned after the ropes were set around their necks.

  ‘Thomas, take the names and dwellings of the felons – though today we are wasting our time. They haven’t a pennyworth of goods between them.’

  It was the task of the coroner to record all executions and make sure that the property of the hanged was collected, as it was forfeit to the Crown. But most criminals were penniless ruffians, whose only possessions were their tattered clothes, fit only to be burned or buried with them, if they avoided rotting in chains or on the gibbet.

  Gwyn had wandered off to buy a pie, so the coroner sat on the edge of the cart to await the ceremony. Soon a small procession wound its way from the South Gate and there was an expectant buzz from the crowd, which parted on the road to allow another cart to trundle through, escorted by a dozen soldiers from the castle. As it came nearer, he could see a woman running alongside the wagon, throwing herself at its side every few yards. Nearer still and he could hear her screaming and wailing, as she tried to clutch its rough rails. The cart, pulled by a stolid mare, slowly rolled up to the foot of the hanging tree, the mob rolling in behind it like a human wave.

  Standing inside, their hands lashed to the front rail to keep them upright, were the victims of today’s ritual. An old man, grey hair falling in unkempt strands over his threadbare smock, slumped uncaringly, his chin on his chest, bereft of any hope. John sensed that his death might be a welcome release from a long, miserable life.

  In stark contrast, the other was shaking with fear, worsened by his poor mother’s hysterical screams as she scrabbled at the side of the wagon. He was a thin waif of thirteen, his red hair heightening the pallor of his face, a white mask with red-rimmed eyes, from which tears dribbled down his sallow cheeks.

  The babble and screams of the woman, herself less than thirty years old, were almost incoherent, but John picked out repeated exhortations to God to save her only son.

  As soon as the cart stopped, one of the soldiers walking behind it pulled her away. ‘Come on, Mother, there’s nothing you can do.’

  She fell to her knees in the muddy earth and clasped his legs, her terror-racked face upturned to him in agony worse than that her child was soon to suffer.

  ‘My son! Save him! Let him go, sir!’

  More embarrassed than angry, the sergeant-at-arms pulled his feet away and she fell to her face in the wet soil. A yeoman, obviously her husband, pulled her gently to her feet and led her away towards the edge of the crowd, as she continued alternately to sob and howl.

  The soldier motioned the carter to move directly under the gallows, while he walked up to the coroner and raised a hand to his chest in a perfunctory salute. ‘You need the names of these felons, Sir John?’

  ‘And their place of abode, if you know them, sergeant.’ He turned to point at Thomas, who was still leaning against the other side of the unused wagon. ‘Give them to my clerk there, to record on his roll.’

  The soldier hesitated. ‘There was also a message I was to give you, Crowner. The town crier may have some news of the man found dead in Widecombe.’

  News travelled fast within the closed community of Exeter, where every citizen was a professional gossip. They all knew about the man lying stabbed in the stream, fifteen miles from the city.

  ‘What news, man?’ demanded John.

  ‘I don’t know, sir. But a journeyman mason told the crier that he wished to speak to you. He is working at the cathedral.’ He turned on his heel and went about his business.

  As John pondered the development in the Widecombe affair, the last act of the drama before him was be
ing played out.

  The hangman, who on days other than Tuesday or Friday, ran a butcher’s trade in the Shambles, climbed a rough ladder resting against the gallows cross-bar and pulled down two nooses that had been wrapped around the timber. Then he slid a plank deftly across the width of the wagon under the side-rails and climbed aboard. John sensed the hubbub of the crowd damping down, as the man untied the ropes that lashed the two victims to the cart, leaving their wrists tied. The old man he urged up to stand on the plank and the boy he lifted on to it. The child was keening softly, staring at his mother and father on the edge of the crowd in mixed supplication and incomprehension.

  With the soldiers had come a priest, and he now began to read some unintelligible dirge in Latin from a book held before him, his tone suggesting that this was an unwelcome chore with which someone from the diocese was stuck every Tuesday and Friday. The hangman slipped the rope over the old man’s head and pulled it firm. Then he did the same to the boy, who began to screaming, his wails matched by heartrending cries from his mother. The crowd was silent, but as the executioner leaped from the wagon and smacked the horse’s flank, a low animal growl rose from the throng.

  The mare, as well accustomed as the priest to what was required, moved forward with a jerk. The noise from the crowd swelled and, as the two victims tumbled first from the plank and then from the back of the moving wagon as it cleared the gallows, an orgasmal groan spread across the meadows.

  The screeching of the boy was strangled into a gargling croak as the noose tightened around his neck and he began to kick furiously, constantly at first, then in spasmodic jerks. With a cry of despair, his father broke from the crowd and raced to the gallows. He flung himself around his son’s legs and pulled as hard as he could to shorten the death throes, oblivious of the collapse of his wife into a dead faint.

  The old vagrant died as he had lived, quietly and inconspicuously. A few intermittent twitches lasted for several minutes as his soul left the unhappy body that had sheltered it for sixty years.

  The coroner watched impassively, but with a return of the unease and foreboding that these rituals always generated. What sense could there be in publicly throttling a young lad who had run away with a pot worth twelve pence? Would there ever be a time in England when a better method of dealing with juvenile petty thieves could be devised? He motioned to Thomas and Gwyn as the two corpses made their last nervous twitches on the gallows.

  ‘Come on, Thomas – and you, Gwyn. There’s an inquest to hold, and on the way we’ll hear what this journeyman has to tell us about our mysterious corpse from the edge of Dartmoor.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  In which Crowner John meets a mason

  The crowd, their passions satisfied, drifted raggedly back to the town gates, the pedlars still trying to sell and the children still darting about in play.

  The coroner strode out more robustly, overtaking the straggling throng on the muddy roadway, his small clerk almost running to keep up with him. Once in the town, they climbed the slope of South Gate Street and turned right into Bear Lane, which led towards the cathedral precinct. This part of Exeter was an island of episcopal independence, outside the jurisdiction of the sheriff and portreeves. A narrow entrance – one of six around the precinct – was known as Beargate and carried a door of blackened oak, studded with crude bolt-heads and iron bands. During daylight it lay open and led into the territory of Henry Marshall, Bishop of Exeter, whose diocese stretched from the edge of Somerset to the tip of Cornwall.

  Beyond Beargate, there was a stifling clutter of buildings on twisting lanes. Here lived those of the twenty-four canons who were resident in Exeter, the other ranks of the cathedral hierarchy and the servants, families and hangers-on who made up the considerable population of the religious heart of the city. The lanes were as filthy as those in the rest of the town, composed of trodden mud and refuse. The coroner and his hobbling, skipping clerk pushed their way through the ambling pedestrians and walked past the dwellings that clustered against the cloisters to their right. This brought them to the west end of the cathedral and the more open area of the Close.

  Between the north side of the cathedral and the jumble of buildings that lined the High Street beyond were several acres of grass, weeds and bare earth. Its saving grace was a number of large trees that provided welcome shade around the edges and along the many trodden paths. The coroner spared it not a single glance – he had been familiar with the Close all his life – but if he had been of a more aesthetic turn of mind, he might have thought it incongruous that such a beautifully crafted house of God should be so closely surrounded by a combination of rubbish-dump, meadow, cemetery, games arena and market place.

  Shop stalls lined the outer paths and youths noisily threw and kicked crude leather balls about. Old and fresh graves lay haphazardly across the ground, with piles of red earth thrown up by the pit-makers and old bones from previous burials, which they took to the charnel house near St Mary Major Church on the further side of the Close. A trench ran across the area, carrying sewage from the canons’ houses down towards the distant river. The all-pervading smell of garbage was as constant here as throughout the rest of Exeter. None of this reached John de Wolfe’s consciousness as he marched the last few yards around the end of the cathedral and back to the North Tower, one of the two massive blocks that flanked each side of the nave and chancel.

  ‘This man was to be here, was he?’ snapped the coroner over his shoulder.

  Panting with the effort of keeping up, Thomas nodded. ‘Cenwulf, the sergeant said – a master-mason of Lincoln.’

  They came to a halt at the foot of the tower, where a dozen men were working. Some were operating a pulley hoist to the dizzy heights of the parapet, taking blocks of stone to masons working a hundred and forty feet above them. On the ground, others were manhandling new unfinished stones from an ox-cart while yet others shaped blocks in various stages of completion. A few old men stood watching, but as the building process had been going on for most of the century – since 1114, when Bishop William Warelwast began replacing the previous Saxon church – there was little that was new to watch.

  John approached the nearest man. ‘Where would I find Cenwulf of Lincoln?’ he demanded.

  The craftsman rocked back on to his heels, resting his iron chisel and heavy mallet on the ground. A thick leather apron, scarred by tools and chippings, covered him from neck to knees. ‘Who wants to know?’ He was a middle-aged fellow, his face almost as leathery as his apron but relieved by a pair of bright blue eyes.

  ‘The King’s coroner,’ said John bluntly.

  The mason dropped his tools and rose slowly to his feet. Master masons were never a servile breed, they were sought-after craftsmen, well paid, with a strong guild behind them. But the mention of the King triggered respect and attentiveness.

  ‘Look no further, Crowner, I’m Cenwulf … and I know what business you have with me.’

  John liked his directness, sensing an honesty and a desire to assist that was absent in most folk, who would do all they could to evade any contact with the law. ‘Then tell me what you know of this man who lies dead now in Widecombe,’ he said, settled his backside against a large untrimmed stone block and folded his arms, ready to listen.

  ‘It’s little enough, sir. But I heard the town crier’s messages this morning, when he paraded the close, wanting news of many things, including a man slain near Widecombe. It may have been the same fellow that I met just twelve days ago at Honiton.’

  The coroner nodded encouragingly, his long hair swirling over the neckband of his grey tunic. ‘Why do you think he was that man, mason?’

  ‘Fair, and about the same age as claimed by the crier, but that is little enough. Yet he had a tanned skin and wore a Mussulman’s sword in a curved sheath on his belt.’

  ‘What was he wearing?’

  ‘When I saw him, a moleskin rain-cloak, but under that, a green tunic or a surcoat – I couldn’t swear to which. And a red
cloth capuchin on his head. He had curious high riding boots, too.’

  Thomas, lurking behind his master, whispered in his ear, ‘Certainly sounds like our cadaver.’

  Ignoring him, John continued, ‘Where, then, did you see him?’

  ‘We had harsh words, that fellow and me, a wonder we didn’t come to blows.’

  John’s interest quickened. Was this another possible suspect, he wondered. Though it seemed odd that he volunteered in his first few words that there had been bad blood between them, considering that the other man had come to a violent end.

  ‘I came by my pony from Salisbury, where my contract on the cathedral there had finished and I had arranged for three months’ work here. On the last morning of the journey, I stopped for ale and meat at an inn in Honiton, some fifteen miles on the east road from Exeter. While I was taking my ease on the benches outside, eating and drinking, this man led his horse from the stable and then mounted. The innkeeper stood out to bid him a good journey, so no doubt he had stayed the night there.’

  John scratched the stubble on his dark chin. ‘Why did you dispute with him?’

  The mason traced a finger almost lovingly along the huge stone touching the material that was his life’s work. ‘He got up on his steed and prodded its belly with a spur. The beast lunged forwards like an arrow from a bow and raced past me, splashing mud and horse-shit from the yard all over me. The bread I was eating was fouled and my clothing splattered.’

  ‘It was an accident?’ John prompted.

  ‘Accident be damned! It was the sheer thoughtlessness of a young man with no respect for his elders.’

  ‘So what did you do?’ chipped in the coroner’s clerk.

  ‘I yelled after him and shook my fist. He looked back, wheeled his horse around and came back to me. I thought he was going to apologise … but he started to abuse me for shouting and gesturing at him.’

  John was not interested in their quarrel – it seemed hardly likely to lead to a murder. He wanted to know more about the other man. ‘Do you know his name – or where he came from, or where he was bound?’