Shroud of Dishonour tk-5

by Maureen Ash

  He gestured towards the list of names. “If any of the men we are enquiring about has committed that same transgression, and has atoned, surely their wrongdoing could not spawn such hatred as these crimes suggest? Those of us who remain chaste are only too aware how hard it is to resist a woman’s charms and would understand, and forgive, the sin of a brother who has strayed.”

  “Sometimes envy is just as great a spur as lust, Emilius,” Bascot replied. “To watch another enjoy what you fervently desire can, in some men, foster a deep resentment which can turn to hatred.”

  The draper nodded. “You may be right,” he admitted reluctantly. “It could be that one of our brothers has succumbed to what St. Paul called mysterium iniquitatis-the mystery of evil. But I hope it proves not to be a Templar that has either caused, or perpetrated these murders. The crimes are terrible ones for any man to commit, but for a Templar it is doubly so. He will not only have betrayed Christ and his brethren, but every man, woman and child in Christendom. The faith the populace have in the probity of those who belong to the Order will be severely tested.”

  Bascot nodded in commiseration. The purpose of the Order was to protect Christians; if it was found that one of its members had killed two Christian women, it would break a trust that should be inviolable. The doubting glances passersby had directed at Bascot on the day he had gone into town with Roget would become ones of loathing and disgust.

  Emilius looked up, his face suddenly etched with determination. “As the preceptor said, we are at battle with this villain, Templar or not. The outcome shall be as God wills it. In that we must trust.”

  Ten

  Later that afternoon, at d’Arderon’s direction, Bascot went to the castle to speak to Gerard Camville. The Templar told Camville the departure of the contingent had been postponed and that the preceptor was taking steps to try and find any information that might uncover the identity of the murderer.

  Camville had listened in silence while Bascot had been speaking, pacing back and forth on the hard-packed earth of the ward as he did so. Finally, he said, “And if the initiator of these crimes proves to be a Templar, will I be apprised of that fact?”

  Bascot made no reply and the question hung unanswered in the air. After a few uncomfortable moments, the sheriff nodded, and said, “So be it. Since you will now be in the Lincoln enclave for the nonce, is d’Arderon still willing for you to give your assistance in the investigation?”

  Bascot confirmed that the preceptor’s sanction continued and, learning that Camville intended to send Roget into the town to question Adele’s patrons, suggested he accompany the captain. The sheriff gave his assent and the two men, relieved to be away from Camville’s ill-humour, walked down into the town through Bailgate, the massive arch that separated the upper portion of the town from the lower, and then down the aptly named Steep Hill onto the main thorough-fare of Mikelgate.

  The house where Adele Delorme had lived and subsequently been murdered was on Danesgate, a side street that debouched into Mikelgate near the bottom of Steep Hill. Roget had told the Templar of his finding of the thirty silver coins but admitted that, in the confusion surrounding the discovery of the body, he had not had time to search the premises thoroughly. It was possible, they decided, that he had missed some trace of the murderer’s presence and so they began their enquiry at Adele’s house.

  Danesgate curved in an arc down to Claxledgate on the eastern side of the city. Bascot had been in this area once before, when he had gone to view the bodies of four people that had been found murdered in an alehouse. Adele’s house was not quite so far along the road as the alehouse, and was a dwelling of modest size, two stories high, squeezed in between two houses of more substantial proportions. The location of Adele’s house, Bascot noted, was not far from the eastern wall of the town and a small gateway that led out onto the path up to the preceptory. As d’Arderon had pointed out, it would not have taken long for a man to come into the town that way, enter the prostitute’s house and murder her, and then make his escape outside the walls via the same route. The thought that it might have been a Templar brother that had done so filled him with dread.

  As they stood in front of Adele’s door, Roget told Bascot that the prostitute’s body had been removed to the charnel house of the nearby church of St. Cuthbert. “It was in a terrible state, mon ami. The priest at St. Cuthbert uses the services of a couple of parish goodwives to prepare female corpses for burial. I have no doubt they will have spread reports throughout the town by nightfall of the butchery done to Adele’s body.”

  They opened the door and went in. The entryway was small, with a floor of grey slate and a flight of stairs leading to the upper storey on one side. Climbing the stairs, they went into the bedroom where the harlot had been found. Apart from a small amount of blood that had dribbled from Adele’s postmortem wounds onto a sheepskin rug that had been lying underneath her body, the room was hardly disturbed. A bed with a thick mattress was against one wall, a silken cover pushed back as though the occupant of the bed had risen hastily, and a small table set with a flagon of wine and pewter cups stood in one corner. The furnishings were of good quality. Beside the sheepskin rug, there were two chairs with arms and padded seats. A small tapestry hung on the wall near the bed. It depicted Jesus driving out the seven devils that had inhabited the body of Mary the Magdalene, a woman that many clerics claimed had been a prostitute.

  They searched among the dead woman’s personal possessions; a chest filled with clothes made from expensive materials, a small casket with a few items of jewellery, one or two set with semi-precious stones, and a small cupboard that held vials of perfume and pots of unguents. Both men felt a reluctance for the task, it was as though they were prying into the dead woman’s intimate secrets. Underneath the clothes in the chest, they found a silk purse containing about five pounds in silver coins.

  Finding nothing that gave them a clue to Adele’s intruder, they went into an adjoining chamber, but it was empty except for some boxes containing more clothing and some household linen. In the corner was a trestle bed. On it was a rolled up straw mattress and a pile of rough woollen blankets. Roget had been told by the armourer who had found Adele’s body that the servant employed by the prostitute had recently left and not been replaced. This would most likely have been the room a maidservant would use.

  They went downstairs and into a small room that led off the entryway. It appeared to be a chamber that the harlot had used for a preliminary entertaining of her male guests before retiring to the bedchamber upstairs. Besides a table and two comfortable chairs, there was a brazier in one corner containing a few remnants of cold charcoal. On the table was an unstoppered jug of wine and a pewter cup filled to the brim. It was a handsomely appointed chamber, with wood panelling extending halfway up the walls and small tapestries hung above with depictions that were lascivious in nature. One featured a unicorn with an engorged phallus preparing to mount a snow white mare and the others were of scantily clad maidens posing in forest glades or reclining by secluded pools. Again there was no sign of a disturbance. If the murderer had been a patron of Adele’s, it was likely she had offered him a cup of wine in here-which he had not drunk-and then taken him upstairs, and to her death.

  The captain was glad that Bascot was with him. This investigation was not a task that Roget relished. More accustomed to using his fists or sword in direct confrontations with thieves and other petty miscreants, he was well aware that he had little skill in detecting the nuances that betrayed the identity of a murderer. The Templar, on the other hand, had a facility for searching out seemingly irrelevant inconsistencies and proving they were important. Roget did not know if Bascot’s talent was due to the education he had received in a monastery during his youth or whether his years of imprisonment had made him more sensitive to his surroundings but, whatever the reason, the captain was more than willing to let the Templar take the lead in their search.

  “Are there any buildings at the back of the
premises?” Bascot asked, breaking in on Roget’s reverie.

  “Only a shed,” the captain replied, leading the Templar out of the chamber and along a narrow passageway to a small enclosed yard.

  There was little else and the two men were preparing to depart when the gate in the shoulder-high fence that surrounded the yard opened and a woman came through. She was about twenty-five years of age, demurely garbed in a plain grey gown and wore a white linen headdress. The rim of hair showing at the edge of her coif was dark brown. She was not uncomely, but neither was she handsome. Her most attractive feature was her eyes, which were a warm hazel colour and had a lively sparkle. Her glance flicked to the Templar badge Bascot wore on the shoulder of his tunic and then to Roget, dwelling on the copper rings that were threaded through his beard before she spoke to him.

  “Are you the captain of the sheriff’s town guard?” she asked in a voice that was soft and mellow.

  “I am,” Roget confirmed.

  “I saw you both enter Adele’s house from next door, which is where I live,” she said. “My name is Constance Turner and I wanted to speak to you.”

  Looking behind her, she motioned to someone on the other side of the gate. A young serving maid crept through. She was a very small and skinny young girl, and looked to be no more than fifteen years old. Her bony little face was fearful and she was wringing her hands in distress.

  “This is my maid, Agnes,” Constance said. “I think she may have seen the man that murdered my neighbour.”

  “ I am a perfume and unguent maker,” mistress Turner said, “and, because goat’s milk is kind to women’s skin, I often use it in my preparations. I like to get it as fresh as possible and buy it from a neighbour just a few houses away who milks his goats early in the morning. Yesterday, I sent Agnes with a jug to get some and, as she was returning, she saw a man knocking at Adele’s door.”

  Mistress Turner then added, without any seeming embarrassment for living in such close proximity to a prostitute, “All of us who live in the adjoining houses were well aware that Adele was a harlot and thought none the worse of her for it. She was a good neighbour, discreet and kindly spoken, and so we took no notice of the men who came to visit her on a regular basis. They, too, were circumspect and all of them are, or were, in the habit of coming in the evening, after dark. To see a man knocking on Adele’s door at such an early hour drew Agnes’s attention.” She glanced at the maid and bid her relate what she had seen.

  The maid was shy, but her confidence had been bolstered by her mistress’s ease of manner. “ ’Twas like Mistress Turner said, lords,” she told them. “It were early, just after Prime. I was comin’ back with the goat’s milk when I saw this man walkin’ ahead of me. I didn’t take no notice ’til he stopped and rapped on Mistress Adele’s door. After a minute or two, I saw her open it and speak to the man, and then she let him in.”

  “Did you see his face, ma petite?” Roget asked.

  Agnes shook her head. “He had his back to me. I could only see that he were neither short nor tall, just middlin’.”

  “What about the colour of his hair, or the cut of his clothes?” Bascot asked.

  Agnes flushed a deep red at being addressed directly by a man of knight’s standing, and she answered hesitantly. “I couldn’t see how he was dressed, or his face. He had a cloak on, a long one that reached the ground with a hood that was pulled up.”

  “That is why I thought the man Agnes saw must have been the one that strangled Adele,” Constance Turner interjected, her voice trembling a little for the first time at mention of how her neighbour had died. “The spring weather is warm. Why would a man wear a cloak and hood on such a fine day unless he wished to mask his identity?”

  She gave both men a direct glance before she went on. “It is possible, of course, that he merely did not wish to be recognised while visiting a prostitute, but it was very early in the morning for such an activity and, considering that my neighbour, from what I understand, was killed about the time that my maid saw the man at her door…”

  “You are probably correct, mistress,” Bascot told her, “but without a description, it will be very difficult to identify him.”

  Constance nodded to Agnes. “Tell them the rest.”

  Again, Agnes blushed, but did as she was bid. “When the man lifted his hand to knock on the door, his cloak hitched up and I could see the clasp that were holdin’ the edges together at the neck. I came nearer to him while he was talkin’ to Mistress Adele and could see it plain.”

  She lifted eyes shining with awe. “It was a wondrous clasp, masters, a circlet of gold bearing the image of St. Christopher! There were jewels on it, too, around the edge and on the saint’s staff.”

  “Are you certain?” Bascot asked doubtfully, wondering if her youthful imagination had caused her to embellish the details of what she had witnessed. “You must have seen the clasp only fleetingly and from a distance.”

  But the little maid’s insistence forced him to reject his misgivings. “I knows the blessed image of St. Christopher right well, lord,” she said earnestly, “for I carries his likeness to keep me safe whenever I goes about the town for my mistress.”

  She reached inside the collar of her gown and pulled out a cheap pewter medal strung on a cord around her neck. It was etched with a crude picture of the saint reputed to protect travellers, a staff in his hand and a small child atop his shoulders. “The clasp the man wore had a picture on it just like this one,” Agnes asserted, “and, like I said, I was near enough to see it plain. I knows it was St. Christopher.”

  Bascot and Roget looked at one another. This little bit of information could indeed be useful. Only a man of more than moderate means would be able to afford such an ornament and, to Bascot’s private relief, was unlikely to have been worn by a Templar. The vow of poverty each brother took on entering the Order dictated that any wealth they possessed was to be given to a family member or donated as a charitable gift before they were accepted for initiation. It was possible there might be a brother who secretly retained some of his smaller valuables, but not probable. The evidence of the gold brooch decorated with precious stones, combined with two purses each containing thirty silver pennies that had been left by the murdered harlots’ bodies, would suggest the killer was a man of considerable fortune. It was unlikely the retention of such wealth could have been kept privily in the closeness of the Templar communal routine. But while both men were grateful to the perfumer for offering her maid’s testimony, the knowledge the two women possessed could put them in danger.

  “We thank you for your help, and that of your maid,” Bascot said to Constance. “But I would caution you both not to mention to anyone else that Agnes saw this man, or his clasp. If the early caller at Adele Delorme’s door was indeed the murderer, he took great pains to ensure he would not be recognised. If he believes you possess even the smallest clue to his identity, your lives may be in peril.”

  The faces of both women blanched white and Agnes started to whimper. “As long as you keep silent, there should not be too great a risk,” Bascot assured them. “And I am certain Captain Roget will assign one of the town guards to keep a constant watch over your house, just in case the man you saw should return.”

  “Certainement,” Roget assured the perfumer. Despite the gravity of the situation, Bascot noticed that the former mercenary was favourably impressed with the appearance of Constance Turner. She was not the type of woman who usually attracted Roget; those that Bascot had seen him with during the time the Templar had spent in Lincoln castle had been more buxom and openly lusty in demeanour. But from the smile that lit the captain’s face when he spoke to Constance, it was certain that he found her calm manner and soft brown eyes more than lightly appealing.

  “There is just one more question I would like to ask you, mistress,” Bascot said. “I am sure you will have heard that another prostitute was murdered before your neighbour and that her body was found in the Templar chapel of the Lincol
n commandery. It has been said that her death was due to one of my Templar brethren having congress with a harlot. Since you said that you, along with others who live on this street, knew the identities of all the men that visited your neighbour, I must ask if, to your knowledge, any of them was a member of our Order.”

  Constance and Agnes both shook their heads. “All of Adele’s patrons were men who live in the town,” the perfumer replied. “As far as I am aware, you are the first Templar that has ever been seen at Adele’s door.”

  Eleven

  It was late in the afternoon by the time Roget returned to the castle bail. He and Bascot had spoken to all of Adele Delorme’s patrons from a list Mistress Turner supplied and questioned them as to their whereabouts on the previous morning about the time that Agnes had seen a cloaked and hooded man enter the prostitute’s house. Every one of them had witnesses to their presence elsewhere, most having been at home with family members or household servants near at hand. A couple had already been at work-one in the chandlery shop he owned, the other in his premises in Parchmingate where he stocked a selection of writing implements and supplies. The assistants of both men vouched for their presence.

  The captain knew that Camville would not be pleased with their failure to discover any trace of the man and dreaded giving the sheriff his report. Apart from knowledge of the time the cloaked figure had entered the prostitute’s house, there was nothing else. When Roget left Bascot to make his way back to the enclave, he saw the same look of frustration on the Templar’s face. There seemed to be nowhere else to search.

  Gianni was in the ward when Roget came in through the castle gate and saw the dispiritedness in the captain’s eyes. The time for the evening meal was over and the boy had been on his way to the barracks to sit down in a quiet corner and complete some mathematical exercises that Lambert had given him. Gianni was now in the final stages of completing the Quadrivium, lessons in arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Since a clerk would have little use for knowledge of the stars and their movements or be involved in entertaining a patron with his skill on a musical instrument, Lambert, who was tutoring Gianni under John Blund’s direction, had skimmed over both of these subjects and was concentrating instead on mathematics, for a good command of arithmetic was extremely important if the boy was to become a competent clerk.