A Plague of Heretics (46 page)

‘Thomas, I can’t go storming in there with a naked sword and I’m not leaving it in the street. You’re a priest. You go in and see if there’s any sign of him.’

He waited with Gwyn at the edge of the road, listening to the cries of other searchers lower down towards the West Gate. The fitful light of a gibbous moon appeared through a gap in the clouds and illuminated another group of men coming out of Milk Lane almost opposite, their tramping feet echoing in the night air.

Then their attention was jerked back to the church as Thomas’s face appeared in the doorway, looking even paler than usual, given the poor light.

‘You’d better come in, master!’ he said in a very subdued voice. ‘Sword or no sword, this is more important.’

John and his officer followed the clerk into the bare nave lit only by a pair of candles on the altar.

As Thomas led them towards the chancel step, he began intoning,
‘Domine, requiem aeternam dona eis, et lux perpetua luceat eis.’

A moment later they saw the outline of a man spreadeagled across the step, his arms outstretched as if in supplication to the cross on the altar table. De Wolfe bent and grasped the back of his hair and lifted the head to see the face.

It was Clement of Salisbury, his features contorted in a final grimace of agony, his mouth twisted into a rictus of pain. Smashed alongside him was a small pottery bottle, a trickle of dark liquid still seeping down a crack in the chancel step, just as the physician’s life had seeped away a short while earlier.

Next morning the main participants assembled again in the hall of Clement’s house. Mary had brought in pastries, ale, cider and wine from her kitchen, and they sat around the large table where some time ago John and Matilda had eaten supper with the physician and his wife.

‘How is the young maid today?’ asked the sheriff, who sat at the head of the table.

‘Recovering, thank the Blessed Virgin,’ said Enyd de Wolfe, who had appointed herself chief nurse. ‘She has regained her senses but has a severe headache and her face is sore from that bruise. The apothecary, bless him, has given her a strong draught to let her sleep today.’

‘The poor child must have had a heavy blow to the face,’ added Hilda, who sat next to John and held his hand under cover of the table.

‘My husband hit her when she tried to stop him assaulting me,’ whispered Cecilia. She had insisted on leaving her bed when the others came, saying that it was her throat that was afflicted, not her legs or brain. She wore a heavy blue brocade surcoat over her nightgown, the collar turned up over a swathe of bandage that Richard Lustcote had wound around her neck to hold his poultice in place.

‘Don’t strain your throat, dear woman,’ advised Enyd solicitously, but Cecilia said that whispering was not a problem.

‘I want to expose all the facts of this terrible matter, so that no one carries any further blame,’ she breathed earnestly. ‘The fault lay entirely in this household, I fear, for my husband was quite mad, though I did not fully realise it until last night.’

The others listened in horrified fascination as she slowly and quietly revealed the extent of Clement’s obsessions.

‘He did not move to Exeter to set up a better physician’s practice,’ she said. ‘We were forced to leave Salisbury because of his behaviour.’

‘In what sense, lady?’ asked Brother Rufus in a gentle voice.

‘His obsession with religion, which he must have had all his life, grew more extreme there. His first choice was to become a priest, not a doctor, but his parents would not allow it. Perhaps even then they suspected his strange notions.’

‘Which were?’ prompted Thomas, fascinated by this story of religious distortion.

‘That the perfection of the Church was established by the early founders in Rome and this was the only thing that mattered. Adherence to their precepts was the salvation of the world and any deviation from their rituals was the work of the devil.’

‘But many priests, especially in the higher orders, would fully agree with that!’ objected Rufus mildly.

Cecilia coughed and paused a moment to rest her voice, Enyd patting her shoulder and offering her a cup of watered wine.

‘Not to the exclusion of every other topic,’ she continued after a while. ‘He preached at me continually, always on the same theme of the purity of the Church of Rome and the need to be always vigilant against its enemies and detractors. It became so monotonous that I tried to turn away from God, but he punished me for it.’

‘Punished? You mean by force?’ asked Hilda aghast.

For answer Cecilia pushed up the loose sleeves of her surcoat and exposed her arms. They bore many yellow and green bruises, some of considerable age.

‘He often pulled and punched me, if I dared disagree with his ranting or was reluctant to go to devotions with him. But he took care to mark me only where it did not show in public’

‘The bastard!’ muttered John. ‘Who would have guessed it?’

‘The people in Salisbury, for a start,’ replied Cecilia. ‘Though he was an effective physician, as long as he was paid well enough, he could never resist preaching at his patients and became unpopular as a result.’

‘Was that cause enough to leave?’ asked Rufus.

‘The end began when he struck one woman who told him to leave religion to the priests and stick to prescribing pills!’ replied Cecilia. ‘The last straw was when he refused to treat a sick infant when he discovered it had not yet been baptised and it later died.’

‘And you say he was violent towards you – did he ever try to strangle you, like last night?’ asked Henry de Furnellis.

‘No, it was always shaking and striking,’ she said with tears in her eyes. ‘And he would also punish me by his strange ways in the bedchamber,’ she whispered, her pallid face flushing as she dropped her eyes in embarrassment.

The sheriff hurried to cover up her distress by changing the direction of his questions. ‘We need to know why he tried to kill you and how that was connected to the death of Lady Matilda next door,’ he said gravely.

Enyd held up her hand and then gave Cecilia a cup of warm honeyed milk. ‘She is talking too much, important as it is. Give her a moment’s rest, please.’

Mary, who was hovering in the background, occupied the break by handing round the platter of pastries filled with chopped meat and herbs and refilling empty cups from the jugs that stood on the table. Soon, Cecilia finished her soothing draught and handed the mug back to John’s mother with a grateful smile.

‘It all happened so quickly last night,’ she continued. ‘Clement had claimed he had a sore throat since the previous evening and had bound up his neck with a length of flannel, just as I am now!’ She smiled wanly at the ironic similarity. ‘Last evening he came in from his work and said he was going to apply more liniment to his throat, so went into the bedchamber. A few moments later I happened to walk in on him and found him with his tunic opened at the neck, as he pulled off the long strip of flannel.’

She stopped and stared down at her hands on the edge of the table, as if reliving that cataclysmic moment in her life.

‘And then?’ prompted John gently.

‘I saw that the skin of his neck was covered in scratches, running downwards under his chin and jaw. I knew what they were; they were made by fingernails clawing at his neck. Instantly, he tried to cover them up again with the cloth, to hide them from me, so I knew they came from some wrongdoing. My first thought was that they were from some woman’s passion in love-making, but then they should have been on his back and chest, not under his chin.’

There was a silence, partly from further embarrassment at the carnal nature of the explanation, but also because Cecilia’s eyes had again filled with tears.

‘I was afraid to challenge him on his infidelity in case he began beating me, but he started ranting about heretics, claiming that this was all their fault. If it had not been for them and the need to exterminate every one, he raved at me, he would not have been in this predicament!’

‘What did he mean?’ asked the sheriff mystified.

De Wolfe was quicker off the mark in his understanding. ‘Was he confessing to having set the fire that killed the fuller in Milk Lane?’

Cecilia started to nod, but the movement hurt her neck and she grimaced before replying. ‘Yes, Sir John. Without my even asking, he started to complain about the forces of the devil being against him, when he was trying to perform God’s work in ridding the city of those who denied the omnipotence of the Holy Church. Those were his actual words!’

She shuddered as she recollected that awful moment. ‘He said that as he was leaving Milk Lane after carrying out his duty as ordained by the Almighty, he saw Matilda de Wolfe standing in the doorway of St Olave’s and was sure that she had recognised him.’

John groaned with dismay as he heard this, recollecting his wife’s strange mood the following day, which must now be put down to her suspicions of the physician. For God’s sake, why did she not confide in him? he agonised.

Enyd offered Cecilia another cup, but she shook her head.

‘By now, my husband was advancing on me, his hands reaching for my throat, as he knew he had fatally compromised himself.’ Her whispers were vibrant with emotion, and John’s mother slipped a comforting arm around her shoulder.

‘But my wife?’ croaked John. ‘What had happened?’

‘Clement said that he could no longer bear the suspense of waiting for her to denounce him and went into her house to confront her. She admitted she had seen him slink out of Milk Lane immediately after the fire had started. Not sure of his guilt, she was going to tell her husband the next day, as it was her duty as wife of a law officer.’

De Wolfe groaned at the explanation. Matilda was prepared to follow her conscience, in spite of her antipathy to him – but she had left it too late.

‘So he silenced her, just as he tried to silence you?’

Cecilia sobbed and Enyd held her tight. ‘He came for me and I ran in here, but he seized me by the throat. My poor little maid heard the commotion, ran in and tried to pull him off, but he felled her to the floor. He ranted that I was a heretic at heart, avoiding church when I could and refusing to join their petition to the canons. I shook him off and ran into the yard, trying to escape, but he followed … and that was the last I remember until you kind people revived me. He must have thought that he had left me dead!’

‘She has had enough now!’ said Enyd de Wolfe firmly. ‘We’ll put you to rest for a while, my dear.’

As the other women went to settle Cecilia on her bed, the men continued to sit around the table in a subdued mood.

‘What happens now?’ asked Ralph Morin, who had been a silent listener to this drama. ‘Where does John stand in this?’

Henry de Furnellis poured himself a pint of cider and drank half of it before replying. ‘Legally, he’s a sanctuary seeker and stands committed by a coroner’s jury to trial before the king’s judges,’ he said. ‘But as that idiot de Courtenay was so grossly influenced by Richard de bloody Revelle, I intend ignoring his verdict in the light of what has happened since.’

‘The facts will have to be put before the Justices of Assize, as a matter of record,’ said John doggedly, even though it might be to his disadvantage.

‘I hope so – otherwise that persistent troublemaker de Revelle will wriggle out of it once again,’ growled Morin.

Thomas de Peyne ventured a suggestion, which was always worth heeding. ‘The Chief Justiciar knows the situation in Devon very well, sir. Should not a letter be sent to him, explaining what has happened? As he’s Archbishop of Canterbury as well, the fact that this grew out of a heresy problem makes it all the more relevant.’

Archbishop Hubert Walter was an old Crusader and knew John de Wolfe better than most other men. It would be a good insurance against any repercussions over this affair, and the sheriff approved of the idea.

‘The next time I go to Westminster with the county farm for the Exchequer, I’ll take such a letter – and see Hubert myself to explain what’s been going on here.’

They sat drinking for a moment longer, then Gwyn opened up a different aspect of the drama.

‘What about these other killings?’ he grunted. ‘Are they all down to this doctor fellow?’

De Wolfe reflectively scratched a flea bite on his head. ‘Maybe we’ll never know! With Clement’s confessed guilt about my wife and to burning that family to death, as well as attacking his wife and her maid, everyone will be happy to lay all other crimes at his feet.’

‘I suppose there’s no reason why he couldn’t have done them,’ boomed Ralph Morin. ‘As a physician, he travelled about outside Exeter. It’s no distance to Wonford, and the other murders were actually in the city.’

The sheriff shrugged. ‘As John says, we’ll never know the whole truth, though he seems the most obvious culprit. The way that poor man’s voice-box was cut out smacks of medical knowledge to me.’

‘Yet that mad monk Alan de Bere and his fanatical friend Rugge were crazy enough to have been the killers,’ countered John.

‘And I wouldn’t put it past those proctors’ men, either!’ added Brother Rufus darkly. ‘Whoever it was, God will know well enough when it comes to the Day of Judgement.’

Thomas nodded fervently and crossed himself, and with a sense of anticlimax the meeting broke up, John taking Mary back next door, leaving his mother and Hilda to care for the bruised and battered women.