A Plague of Heretics (38 page)

As she worked, he told her of the morning’s visit to Polsloe, and as usual she was angrily sympathetic to the victim’s plight.

‘You men are such evil creatures!’ she complained. ‘Look at the harm that has been done to women and children in the space of a few days. You treat animals better than that!’

Few would let a maid speak to them so frankly, but John and Mary understood each other far beyond the usual relationship of master to servant. He cocked his head upwards towards the solar stairs.

‘What mood is your mistress in today?’ he asked. ‘She seems oddly subdued since yesterday, hardly bothering to abuse me!’

Mary nodded as she slid long skewers through the herrings to place across the forked supports over the fire. ‘There’s something bothering her, that’s for sure. But her tongue is recovering, for I heard her shouting at Lucille not long ago.’

The wraith-like French maid lived in abject subjection to Matilda’s bad temper. Recently, when her mistress had gone into retreat in the priory, Lucille had been farmed out to Eleanor de Revelle, but when John’s wife had returned to the house she was reclaimed, as if she was some piece of furniture.

John sat drinking for a while, watching the cook adding herbs to an iron pot of hare stew at the edge of the fire and peeling onions to go with the fish. Suddenly, she looked up.

‘I hear the solar door opening. You had better make yourself scarce,’ she warned.

John took the hint, as Matilda frowned upon his fraternising with the lower classes – especially as she had a shrewd suspicion that in the past John had known Mary a little too well, in the biblical sense. Taking his jug of ale, he slid out of the hut, which faced away from the solar, and hurried around the house, through the covered passage that led to the vestibule.

When she lumbered into the hall, her husband was sitting by the fire, fondling his hound’s ears. She looked at him suspiciously but said nothing as she made her way to her usual seat, the hooded monks’ chair on the other side of the hearth.

From long practice, John was sensitive to her moods and detected that her recent preoccupied depression was now giving way to suppressed anger. She glared across at him as he sat with his ale-pot in his hand.

‘Are you not going to get me something to drink?’ she snapped, her small eyes dark and penetrating.

Relieved that at least she was speaking to him now, John went to the table, where he kept his wines, and filled a pewter cup from a skin of Anjou red. As he handed it to her, he took advantage of the slight thaw in her mood to tell her about the attack in Polsloe. ‘I went to the priory to see the poor woman, but Dame Madge told me she was too ill. She asked after your health, by the way.’

Matilda grabbed the cup and swallowed half the contents in one draught. ‘I suppose that old crone slandered me, telling you what a difficult woman I was when I was there!’ she said bitterly.

‘She did no such thing,’ retorted John indignantly, annoyed by his wife’s lack of charity in ignoring the plight of the ravished woman.

‘The world is full of evil people,’ she muttered obscurely, slipping back into silence until Mary came in some time later to set the table for their dinner. Most households ate directly off the scrubbed boards of their tables, but Matilda had long insisted on wooden or pewter platters to hold the bread trenchers and bowls for potage and stews. When the carrot and herb soup and the grilled herrings were finished, the cook-maid brought a dish of diced fat pork with winter-sweetened parsnips.

The pair champed their way through the courses in surly silence, until Matilda suddenly grunted and fished inside her mouth.

‘That useless woman – she could have broken my teeth!’ she snapped, throwing a small piece of bone down on the table.

John tried to be conciliatory, though he knew that his wife seized on every chance to denigrate Mary. ‘We should build a better cook-shed for her,’ he suggested mildly. ‘It’s very difficult for her to prepare food properly in that tiny place, where she has to live and work.’

Matilda took instant exception to his innocent remark. ‘You contradict me at every turn, John!’ she flared. ‘You always defend the woman – and don’t think I don’t know why! No doubt you employ your lechery on her at every opportunity. Lucille is not blind, you know; she sees plenty from that room of hers!’

The injustice of this accusation melted John’s restraint like the sun on morning frost, especially as he had not laid a lecherous finger on their cook-maid for several years.

‘You see adultery and fornication in every breath I take, woman!’ he shouted across the table. ‘For the sake of St Peter and all his angels, why did you not stay in that damned nunnery and not inflict yourself upon me?’

For answer, she grabbed her platter, which still had some pork gravy on it, and threw it across the table at him. It hit him on the shoulder, and a greasy mess slid down the front of his grey tunic. His quick temper was instantly ignited and he leaped up to yell imprecations at her, while she for her part launched into a screaming diatribe about the years of shame and humiliation she had had to bear from him. It was a familiar pattern for their differences, though the intensity was extreme. Even in the midst of this torrid exchange, John managed to feel a morsel of relief that her former abstracted mood had reverted to something more familiar.

At the height of their abusive exchange, a pale, frightened face appeared around the hall door as Lucille peered in, having heard her mistress’s voice from her den in the yard. Fearing that she might miss a summons and all the castigation that would follow, she peered in to enquire if she was required – but before she could open her mouth, John spotted her and roared at her.

‘Get out of here, you damned spy and carrier of tales!’ he yelled and threw an empty wooden salt-pot at her. It bounced off the draught-screens inside the door but had the desired effect as Lucille’s head vanished abruptly and the door slammed shut.

‘You not only persecute me, but my poor maid as well,’ screeched his wife, ignoring the fact that she made the ‘poor’ maid’s life a misery with her endless demands and scoldings. However, the interruption had dampened their ardour for fighting, and Matilda marched out imperiously, heading for her solar, where she no doubt would continue to harass Lucille. John slumped back into his chair, emotionally drained once more. He wondered how his life could go on like this, but as the anger receded so the problems that beset him began to flood back into his mind. His brother – how was he? He must get down there again very soon, as he had a permanent fear of the manor-reeve riding into Exeter to tell him that William was no more.

Almost guiltily, he again realised that no progress had been made at all on any of the murders of the past week or two. Most killings, certainly in the countryside that contained the majority of England’s population, were either solved almost instantly or never solved at all!

If a house were robbed and someone attacked, then in a village everyone knew within minutes who had done it, except in the rarer cases of some stranger passing through, as at Polsloe. But even there the sharp eyes of nosy old men and curious goodwives usually spotted something unusual happening.

Even in towns and cities, each parish or district had a village attitude and often knew exactly what was going on from moment to moment. It was the casual killings, the robberies with violence by outlaws on lonely roads or the gangs that sometimes came marauding through hamlets that left the rudimentary law-enforcement system paralysed. John felt that lately he had had more of his share of unsolvable crimes.

If he felt guilt about failing to solve a single murder, he had more of the same emotion concerning Hilda, who he felt he was neglecting with all the problems circling around him. He recalled that he had lost his former lover, Nesta, partly because his preoccupation with his duties had led her to feel shut out from a large part of his life.

But soon his common sense pulled him back to earth, and with a muttered curse at the world in general he hauled himself to his feet and went around to the yard to find Mary. After all, he consoled himself, it was just another row with his wife, one of hundreds over the years, though he could not recall her ever throwing a platter at him before. He went into the kitchen-shed to get Mary to swab off the mess on his tunic with hot water and a rag. She did so, clucking her disapproval at the spoiling of a good linen garment.

‘Lucille told me there was a fine row going on,’ she said severely, ‘but I could hear it from here – this household goes from bad to worse!’

‘I think she’s going mad,’ said John gloomily as Mary rubbed at his shoulder. ‘She wallows in self-pity and doesn’t have a good word for anybody or anything – except that bloody church of hers.’

He went back to the vestibule and threw on his cloak to hide the wet patch on his tunic, then went out into the lane. At a loss for a moment as to what to do next, he turned towards the High Street, deciding to go back to Rougemont. At the corner he saw the massive figure of Gwyn coming towards him, ploughing through the crowd like a ship breasting a choppy sea.

‘Crowner, I think I’ve found the bastard!’ he bellowed from several yards away.

‘Found who?’ demanded John as his officer came close.

‘Alan de Bere! Gabriel says one of his men-at-arms swears he saw him this morning coming out of one of those ramshackle huts on Exe Island. Shall we see if we can find him?’

They hurried down to Carfoix and then down the steep slope of Fore Street to the West Gate. Outside, the river ran sluggishly past, separated from the city walls by a wide area of grassy swamp and mud, crisscrossed by leats and ditches. This was Exe Island, sometimes flooded when there was a cloudburst up on distant Exmoor, though a number of poor wooden houses and shacks dotted its unstable surface. Near the walls, a row of slightly better dwellings formed Frog Lane, and at the northern end, where the river bent around, there were fulling mills and other small factories belonging to the thriving cloth trade.

‘Any idea where this soldier saw him?’ asked John, looking at the rickety footbridge across the river and the ford just below it.

‘He said not far from the new bridge,’ answered Gwyn, pointing to where a number of spans of a long stone bridge ended abruptly at the edge of the river. It was an ambitious project of Nicholas Gervase, but the money had given out before it was finished.

There were a few huts dotted about in that area, where some sheep and goats were cropping the sparse grass. The coroner and his officer made their way towards them, jumping across ditches filled with brown mud and turbid water. Some of the shacks were empty, but a few had forlorn families living in them, though none of the occupants admitted to knowing Alan de Bere. A few of the shanties had collapsed and others teetered on the edge of deep leats, ready to fall in at the next flood.

‘That one’s nearest the bridge,’ said Gwyn, pointing at a wooden hut with a roof of grassy turfs, which was almost under one of the stone arches of the unfinished bridge. They walked towards it and were within a dozen paces when the sacking that covered the door-hole was suddenly thrown aside and a thin figure shot out, obviously intent on making his escape.

‘That’s the swine!’ yelled Gwyn and set off in pursuit, with John close on his heels.

The more nimble fugitive, his monk’s habit tucked up between his legs and secured by a belt giving his long legs the freedom to go fast, might well have escaped had he not gone in the wrong direction. The doorway of the hut faced the river and de Bere had run straight ahead, being cut off by the deep main channel of the Exe. John and Gwyn fanned out on each side of him as he stood at bay on the bank and, converging, grabbed him almost simultaneously. He wriggled violently, but Gwyn threw him to the grass and planted a large foot on his chest.

‘You were released from the king’s gaol to be confined in the bishop’s cells,’ growled de Wolfe. ‘So how is it that you are lurking on Exe Island?’

The skinny man in his tattered habit glared up at the coroner, his pale blue eyes having a glint of madness. ‘You have no authority over me. I am a servant of God!’ he screeched.

‘Aren’t we all?’ answered John grimly. ‘You are a miserable little toad, and I want to know where you were on Sunday night.’

‘I was in this hut here, minding my own business.’

Gwyn slid the toe of his boot up until it was pressed against Alan’s throat.

‘You’re a liar. You were in Milk Lane setting a fire. Was Reginald Rugge with you, eh?’

‘I was not, I swear it!’ gurgled the man. ‘I had nothing to do with that.’

Gwyn pressed down harder and the renegade monk began to go blue in the face as he could not breathe.

‘You tried to hang those men last week – and the one who didn’t sail away was Algar the fuller,’ snarled de Wolfe, half-convinced that this was the man they wanted.

‘So you decided to get rid of him in another way, blast you!’ boomed Gwyn, screwing his heel into Alan’s chest.

‘I didn’t, I swear by God and the Virgin!’ gasped the monk. ‘It may have been Rugge for all I know. I’ve not seen him since we were let out by the proctors’ men. Father Julian wouldn’t let me go back to my hut at St Olave’s, so I came here.’

John sighed, as without proof his sense of justice prevailed over his revulsion for the man. He motioned to Gwyn to let the man get to his feet.

‘If I get any evidence that you were responsible for this mortal sin, I’ll see you on your way to hell personally!’ he threatened.