A Plague of Heretics (15 page)

‘Sir John, it’s me, Alfred from Stoke!’

In the dim light from a pitch-brand guttering on the corner of the Close, de Wolfe recognised the reeve from the family manor at Stoke-in-Teignhead, where he had been born and brought up. Surprised and apprehensive, he ushered the man inside and, aware of Matilda in the hall, took him around to Mary’s kitchen-shed, where a good fire burned and the man could get warm and have some food. But first Alfred had to give his momentous news.

‘I have bad tidings, Sir John. The yellow plague has appeared in the village and two are dead and half a dozen taken sick. I am afraid that your brother William is one of them!’

At dawn next morning, three riders left the West Gate soon after it was opened and splashed through the ford across the Exe, heading for the coast road southwards. Grim-faced, John de Wolfe was in the lead, with Alfred and Gwyn close behind. Thomas had been left behind, as though he offered to come, he was an indifferent horseman and would have slowed them down on his pony. Even John had left his heavy destrier, Odin, behind and taken a swifter rounsey from Andrew’s livery stable to speed his journey. As they cantered down the track towards Powderham and Dawlish, John soberly recalled the events that had set them on this mission.

The previous evening, the reeve had explained how John’s mother, Enyd, had sent him to Exeter with the news that his elder brother had been stricken with the fever that had crept into Stoke over the past four days. So far, eight had been afflicted and two of those had died. William, whose solicitude for his free tenants and villeins was well known, had refused to hide himself away in the manor house, but had insisted on visiting the sick and arranging for food and firewood to be supplied to them.

‘He forbade the ladies to accompany him, though they both wished to help,’ Alfred had said. ‘Within a day and a night, he started shivering and soon was yellow, being brought back to collapse on his bed. Only God knows why he was so stricken, when myself, the priest and several others escaped, though we were also helping to aid the sufferers.’

‘What of my mother and sister? Do they remain in good health?’ demanded John. His mother, Enyd, was a sprightly woman in her early sixties, and Evelyn, six years younger than John, was a placid spinster.

‘They show no signs of the curse, thanks be to Christ,’ Alfred reassured him. There was no one else in the family to be concerned about, as William’s wife Alice had died of a childbirth fever three years earlier.

The horses made good time on the firm roads, as the slight frost that had followed the rain had hardened the mud without being severe enough to leave icy patches. In an hour and a half they reached Dawlish, and it was with reluctance that John trotted straight through the little port without calling on Hilda. A few miles further along the track that hugged the coast, they passed the turning into Holcombe, the other de Wolfe manor, where Hilda’s father was the reeve.

‘Do they know there about my brother’s illness?’ shouted John over the noise of the hooves.

‘I sent a message yesterday, but told them to stay away from Stoke in case they bring back the contagion,’ replied Alfred.

At Teignmouth the tide was ebbing fast out of the river, but they had to wait fretfully for half an hour until the water was low enough for their horses to safely navigate the ford to the sand-spit on the other side. From there it was only a few minutes’ canter to reach the head of the wooded valley that held John’s birthplace of Stoke-in-Teignhead. The village was unnaturally quiet; no work was being done in the strip-fields and the single village street was empty. Smoke filtered out from beneath the eaves of many of the tofts to prove that people were alive, but the villagers were shunning any unnecessary contact with each other. As they passed two of the small thatched cottages, John saw ominous boards nailed across the doors, with a black cross painted on them.

They neared the manor house at the further end of the village before they saw the first living person walking towards them, the priest of St Andrew’s Church. He held up his hand and John reined up alongside, fearful that Father Martin had been to the manor to administer the last rites. Thankfully, the sturdy priest was more reassuring.

‘Lord William is no worse, even if not improved, Sir John. He is weak, but still alive, for which I thank the Holy Virgin – as well as your mother and sister, who are tending him like a baby.’

The parson called William ‘lord’ as befitted the eldest son and holder of the manor title, whereas John was ‘sir’ by virtue of his military knighthood.

‘Is there more of the plague in the village?’ asked John.

‘Two more of the sick children have died, God save their souls,’ admitted Father Martin. ‘And two more have fallen ill in another house. I’m on my way to them now, to see if there is anything I can do.’

He looked exhausted, and John suspected that he had hardly slept since the yellow plague had come to Stoke.

They rode on and clattered over the small bridge across the ditch around the house, a defence which had not been needed since before John was born. Inside the stockade, almost an acre of ground held the square stone-built house and the profusion of sheds, huts and barns that made this a working farm as well as a family home.

Though the courtyard had been empty, the sound of their arrival brought boys out of the stables to take their horses. The old steward hurried out to greet them and shepherded John and Gwyn into the house. There was a large central hall, with two pairs of rooms divided off from it on either side and an upper solar built out over a porch at the front. John ordered Gwyn to stay in the hall, as he did not wish to increase the risk of him catching the contagion in the sickroom and taking it back to his family.

In one of the side rooms he found William lying on a low bed and attended solicitously by his mother and sister, with the steward’s large wife and a younger servant hovering anxiously in the background. The Lord of Stoke appeared to be asleep, his mouth open and his eyes shut, but his breathing was laboured and a sheen of sweat lay on his forehead and face, in spite of the coldness of the room. His face was yellow, as were the hands that lay across his chest. On a table near the bed were bowls of boiled water, flasks of liniment and cloths to lay on the patient’s fevered brow and body. A large bunch of herbs was stuck into a jug, and in the firepit at one side of the room fragrant smoke curled up from where other dried herbs had been sprinkled on the logs. These attempts at treatment suggested desperate frustration that was echoed in the haggard faces of Evelyn and Enyd. They came to embrace him, Evelyn with tears seeping from her eyes.

‘He is no worse today, though no better,’ whispered his mother. ‘All we can do is pray for him.’

They all sank to their knees in the clean rushes that covered the floor, hands clasped and heads bowed. John initially felt he was being false, as he had little real faith in pleading for his brother’s recovery when children were lying dead in the village from the same ailment. But as he raised his head and saw his brother’s face as he strained to cling to life, a wave of love and pity flowed over him, and he fervently asked for God’s mercy on a man who had come from the same womb as himself.

After few moments Enyd rose and took John’s arm to lead him back into the hall, where Gwyn was waiting with the reeve.

‘You men must be tired and hungry after your journey,’ she said firmly.

The steward marshalled a couple of young serving girls to bring food and drink from the outside kitchen, and soon they were sitting eating at a table near the firepit.

‘We feel so helpless to do anything either for William or the others in the village,’ said a distraught Evelyn. ‘There is no physician anywhere nor even an apothecary nearer than Brixham.’

‘I doubt it would help much if there were,’ said John cynically. ‘I have a new doctor living next door to me and he flatly refuses to attend any victims, saying there is nothing he can do for them.’

The steward, hovering behind them with a jug of cider, said that he had heard that morning that new cases were being spoken of in Brixham and Dartmouth, further down the coast.

‘All at ports and harbours,’ muttered Gwyn. ‘It must be coming in from abroad, surely?’

‘I seems like it, but how would it have reached Stoke?’ growled John.

‘We have tradesmen in every day,’ answered Evelyn. ‘They bring in fish from Teignmouth – and we had a chapman through here last week. God knows where he’d been before coming here.’

John could hear the suppressed panic in everyone’s voice, which was also beginning to appear in Exeter. This was an invisible foe, stalking the streets and fields with a stealth that could not be detected. If disease came from a rabid dog, then it could be slain, but this yellow plague could be neither seen, heard nor smelled, which made it doubly terrifying.

They went back and sat alongside William’s pallet for a time, watching helplessly as he lay inert, only his rapid breathing showing that he was still alive. From time to time the steward’s wife moved forward and gently wiped his face with a cloth dipped in warm scented water.

‘Has he been awake at all today?’ asked John.

‘He mumbled and muttered some hours ago, but has not spoken rationally to us since last evening. He has passed no water since then, which worries me. The last lot was almost green.’

‘Has he drunk anything?’

‘We tipped a little watered ale between his lips, but he has swallowed very little,’ replied Enyd.

John recalled from his fighting days that wounded men sometimes died of thirst as much as their injuries and, desperate to find some advice to contribute, suggested that they tried harder to get some fluid into his brother.

‘I’ll try to get that bloody doctor to come down here with me,’ he grunted. ‘And if that fails, then at least a good apothecary.’

At noon they sat down to dinner in the hall; though the food was ample and well cooked, no one had much of an appetite – not even Gwyn, whose capacity for his victuals was legendary. Afterwards, they sat again with William, who had hardly moved on his mattress, until John’s mother decided that there was no point in his staying too late.

‘Get you back to Exeter, my son. There’s nothing you can do here. I know you will have duties there to carry out.’

‘I’ll be back tomorrow, later in the day, and will stay until next morning,’ he promised. ‘If you need me more urgently before then, send Alfred and I’ll come, even if it be in the middle of the night!’

As they were climbing into their saddles in the bailey, with the family and servants gathered around, his mother asked him if he was going to call upon Hilda on the way home. Enyd was very fond of the handsome blonde from Dawlish – if there had not been the social gap between the daughter of a Saxon reeve and a knight’s son, she would have welcomed her as a daughter-in-law. But her husband wanted John married off into an aristocratic Norman family and had pushed him into wedlock with Matilda de Revelle. Enyd had done her best to accept Matilda, but in return John’s wife had never concealed her disdain for his mother, mainly because of her Cornish and Welsh parentage.

John considered her question as he arranged his cloak over the back of his saddle. ‘I think not, Mother. I would never forgive myself if I took contagion to her, just for the sake of seeing her face for a few minutes. Alfred says Holcombe is free of it – it would be better if she went to stay there with her parents, rather than keep to Dawlish, with its ships and ship-men coming and going.’

This time, it was only Gwyn and his master who trotted off through the stricken village. John hoped that he would not see Alfred coming again to Exeter, as it would probably mean that he brought news of William’s death.

As they rode, Gwyn told him of what he had learned the previous evening from his tour of the taverns. ‘I found a couple of men who knew some heretics,’ he said. ‘They seem to think that there is no law against it, as no one gets punished.’

‘Did you get to speak to any yourself?’ called John as they rode almost saddle to saddle along the coast road.

His officer shook his bushy head. ‘No, those sort are not likely to be great frequenters of alehouses. But I know they meet in various places to discuss their beliefs.’

He said that one group used an old derelict barn off the Crediton road, not far from the village of Ide, which the potman at the Bush had mentioned.

‘Who are these people, I wonder?’ queried de Wolfe. ‘We know our corpse was a woodworker and, if Thomas was right about the other, he was just a labourer.’

‘One fellow said that several he knew were foreigners, probably French,’ replied Gwyn. ‘Maybe they were from the Languedoc; that seems to be a breeding place for these folk.’

They passed through Dawlish, and once again John had to resist the temptation to call on Hilda, though this time the fear of bringing contamination, however small the risk, made it easier for him to pass by. They reached Exeter as dusk was falling, and Gwyn went off to the Bush to see his wife and check his latest batch of ale-mash. John carried on to Martin’s Lane to hand back his hired horse, but when he emerged from the stables he did not go straight across to his own front door. Instead, he went to the next house and rapped on the heavy oak with the pommel of his dagger. It was opened by a young maid, but before he could state his business Cecilia appeared behind her.