A Plague of Heretics (6 page)

He made an effort to start the sparse conversation again. ‘I thought to ask our new neighbour if he has any opinions on the matter. Maybe as a physician he has some advice about avoiding the contagion.’

This immediately revived his wife’s interest. Apart from anything connected with food, drink and the Church, social advancement was her major concern. ‘Doctor Clement? Yes, he would be aware of all there is to be known about it. His wife told me that he had attended two of the best medical schools in Europe,’ she enthused.

Her small eyes suddenly narrowed as she glared at her husband.

‘But you told me that you did not much care for him, you barbarian!’ she snapped. ‘We at last get a respectable next-door neighbour, instead of a murderer, and you snub him!’

John capitulated; it was the easiest path. ‘Well, he’s not so bad, I suppose, if he dropped a little of his airs and graces. His wife is a handsome woman, I’ll admit.’

Matilda snorted. ‘Trust you to notice a good-looking woman! Don’t you get any of your usual lecherous ideas about her; she’s a most devout and chaste lady.’

She attacked the rest of her trout fiercely, wielding her small eating-knife as if she were cutting out her husband’s heart with a dagger. After a further long silence, she abruptly restarted the stilted conversation.

‘If you really want to talk to the doctor, I’ll invite them in for supper tonight. I doubt I can get that lazy, useless maid of ours to prepare a decent meal, but as you refuse to get anyone better, we’ll just have to put up with her.’

De Wolfe went back to Rougemont after his dinner and again went to see Henry de Furnellis in his chamber in the keep. On the way he met Thomas de Peyne, who was coming out of the tiny garrison chapel of St Mary in the inner ward, and learned from him that there was indeed an outbreak of the yellow plague in Bretayne.

‘Five dead and several more very sick in a couple of huts just below St Nicholas Priory,’ he reported. ‘They are digging a grave pit in St Bartholomew’s churchyard, rather than risk hauling the corpses over to the cathedral Close.’

The cathedral had normally enforced a monopoly of all burials in the city, even though there were twenty-seven other churches within the walls. John was already on his way to talk to the sheriff about this new hazard and Thomas’s news only made it the more urgent. In a city where the inhabitants were packed in so closely together, there was a real danger of a widespread epidemic. He said as much to the grizzled old warrior when he reached his office.

‘Henry, is there anything we can do to lessen the risk of this plague taking a hold in the city?’

The sheriff shrugged, his weathered face wrinkled in despondency. ‘Years ago I saw disease rampage through a town in France. Nothing seemed to stop it, even burning down the afflicted houses. Though that wasn’t this yellow curse, it was vomiting and flux of the bowels.’

John shook his head. ‘This is different. Their skin and eyes go yellow, almost green in some cases. I’m going to do what you suggested, have a word with this new physician; maybe he has some more modern ideas.’ He scratched an itching point in his scalp. ‘I don’t care for the fellow, but this is too serious a situation to pass up anything that might help.’

‘What about this rat business that people are talking about?’ asked de Furnellis. ‘Should we start a war against the little bastards?’

De Wolfe shrugged. ‘God’s guts, Henry! There are a hell of a lot more rats than people in Exeter. You’d need an army of rat-catchers and dogs to clear out half of them.’

The sheriff sadly agreed. ‘I take it you needn’t get involved with inquests down in Bretayne, John?’

De Wolfe shook his head. ‘This is a doctor’s business, not a coroner’s! Let’s hope more cold weather will kill whatever poison that’s causing it.’

As he went down the wooden steps from the first-floor entrance to the keep, he could certainly vouch for the cold weather. The east wind had risen more strongly and was moaning through the battlements on the top of the castle wall. There was no snow, but patches of ice glistened on the ground, where water had frozen in the ruts formed by cartwheels and horses’ hooves.

To avoid going home, he sat for a while in his lofty chamber, but in spite of the small charcoal brazier which stood on a slab of stone on the wooden floor, the cold soon drove him out. He left Thomas there, muffled up in an old Benedictine habit over his thin cassock, as he sat at the table carefully penning the last of the parchment rolls for presentation at the Shire Court next day.

‘Don’t stay too long, lad,’ he said kindly as he lifted the hessian draught-curtain. ‘I don’t want to come here in the morning and find your corpse frozen to that stool!’

Back at Martin’s Lane, he hung his cloak on a wooden peg in the small vestibule behind the front door and sat on the solitary bench to pull off his boots. Though today he had only been walking around the city, he had worn his riding boots to try to keep his feet warm. With a pair of soft house-shoes on his feet, he opened the door to the hall and went into its gloomy cavern, relieved to find that Matilda was not there, only his dog sleeping by the fire. He went across to the hearth, which was his pride and joy, being copied from a house he had seen in Dol in Brittany. Instead of the usual central firepit, with its smoke rising into the room to water the eyes and irritate the throat, he had replaced the back wall of the wooden hall with stone and had a conical chimney added, which took the fumes up through the roof.

There was a good fire of oak logs burning across the iron dogs in the hearth, and with a sigh of contentment he sank into a wooden monks’ chair, rather like an upright coffin, with a high back and side wings to divert the draughts. Giving his old hound Brutus a friendly prod with his foot so that he could drag his seat a little nearer the flames, he stretched out his long legs on to the stone slabs of the hearth.

A moment later the latch rose on the door, but he was happy to see that it was Mary rather than his wife.

‘I thought I heard you come in,’ she said, almost accusingly. ‘The mistress has gone to church. I’ll mull you some ale.’

She spoke in English, heavily accented with the local Devon dialect. Her mother was a fair Saxon, but from her own dark hair, her father was probably a stranger. No one knew who he might have been, as he only stayed for the conception.

She brought him a heavy pottery mug, filled with ale from a pitcher on a side table and thrust a red-hot poker into it, which she had left in the fire in anticipation of his return.

When the sizzling had subsided, he sipped it appreciatively.

‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Mary,’ he said sincerely. ‘If it was left to my dear wife, I’d starve and go around in rags.’

‘I’m glad to see you back from London, that’s all I know,’ she retorted. ‘I lived here alone for months, worried that you’d never come back and I’d be thrown out into the street.’

John cupped his hands around the mug to warm them. ‘I told Matilda not to go down to that damned church – it’s too near Bretayne, now that there’s been an outbreak of the sickness there. You watch out, too, my girl!’

‘And how am I going to do that, pray?’ she snorted. ‘I have to go out to market every morning to see that you are fed. In fact, I’ll have to go out again now, as the mistress wants some fancy food to give those people this evening.’

She went back to her kitchen, Brutus following her, as he decided that the possibility of some scraps outweighed the attractions of a good fire. John sat with his ale, looking around the hall, whose interior rose right up to the rafters that supported the high roof of wooden shingles. The walls, partly wooden planks and partly wattle-and-daub panels inside heavy oak frames, were hung with faded tapestries, their indistinct patterns showing biblical scenes. There was a window low down on the street wall, glassless but covered with yellowed linen inside the hinged shutters. The floor was flagstoned, a novelty insisted upon by Matilda, who considered the usual rushes strewn over beaten earth too common for her station in life.

Soon, the warmth of the fire and the quart of ale combined to send him into a peaceful sleep, where he dreamed of his boyhood down near the coast at Stoke-in-Teignhead, where his mother, sister and elder brother still lived at their manor. William, his brother, was a totally different character from John, though he looked remarkably like him. He had never been a warrior like his younger brother and was devoted to managing their two estates of Stoke and Holcombe, especially since his wife and infant had died in childbirth a few years earlier. Under the will of their long-deceased father, a quarter of the income of the manors came to John, with which he was well content.

The scenes in his mind shifted to their other demesne a few miles away at Holcombe, where he had first become enamoured with Hilda, the daughter of the manor-reeve. In the way that dreams do, the scene suddenly jumped forward a quarter of a century, and as he dozed before his hearth he found himself locked in a passionate embrace with the beautiful blonde until the clatter of the door latch jerked him back to the present. It was Mary, ushering in the large figure of Gwyn.

‘Your man is here to see you,’ she announced. ‘He’s brought you some work, by the sound of it.’

She slipped out again and his officer advanced to the hearth. John knew that Mary must have assured him that Matilda was not at home, or he would not have ventured into the house. Relations between the two were frosty in the extreme, and Matilda usually referred to Gwyn as ‘that Cornish savage’, typical of her Norman disdain of anyone who had Celtic blood – which included her husband, whose mother was half-Welsh.

‘We’ve got a murder, Crowner,’ he proclaimed with almost a gleeful air. ‘A real nasty one, too.’

John rubbed the last of the sleep from his eyes and hauled himself out of his chair. ‘Where is it? If I’m taken out of town and miss these folk coming in from next door, I’ll never hear the last of it from her.’

Gwyn shook his head, his wild auburn locks shaking like the head of a sheaf of corn. ‘Not more than a few hundred paces away! Just this side of the East Gate, in Raden Lane.’

John followed him out of the hall and shrugged on his cloak and a pair of boots, while his henchman gave him some details.

‘A pair of urchins found him, lying in weeds down a narrow alley between two houses. I went up for a quick look after Osric came down to the Bush to look for you.’ Osric was one of the two constables charged by the city council with the arduous task of trying to keep the peace in Exeter’s crowded streets. The coroner and his officer were out in the lane now and facing the biting east wind as they made for the East Gate.

‘So who is he and how did he die?’ snapped John, knowing that Gwyn was wont to make a short story into a long one.

‘I don’t know who he is, for in the state he’s in his own mother would be hard put to recognise him!’

‘So he was beaten up?’ demanded John.

‘Not that simple, Crowner!’ replied Gwyn with relish. ‘He’s had his throat cut and his tongue ripped out!’

De Wolfe’s black eyebrows rose at this. Though he had seen far more horrible mutilations in campaigns across Europe and the Levant, this was unusual in the remote lands of Devon. However, he held back more questions until they reached the scene. Raden Lane was in the most elite part of the city, on the south side of the High Street just before the road ended at the eastern gate. There were a score of large houses there, occupied mostly by rich merchants and burgesses – it was as far away from Bretayne as possible, both geographically and socially.

The two men turned into Raden Lane, where some of the houses were stone-built, set back on plots a short way from the street. Others were made of wood or cob and were flush with the edge of the narrow lane. They were close together but had slim gaps between them, and one of these, halfway up on the left, was an actual path, overgrown with winter-dead weeds. Its sides were formed by the wooden fence-stakes of the houses on either side.

‘He’s up here, Crowner,’ said Gwyn, pushing ahead of him through shrivelled dock-leaves and withered coarse grass. In spite of being a path, it no longer went anywhere, as beyond the long back gardens it had been cut off by a high fence that faced St John’s Hospital near the city wall. No doubt its isolation from lack of use had led to its being chosen as a dumping ground for a murdered corpse.

As the coroner followed Gwyn up the narrow corridor, the skirts of his long grey tunic brushing frost from the weeds, he saw figures standing against the tall hurdles of woven hazel-withies which blocked the end. One was the skinny figure of Osric, a painfully thin Saxon, the other his fellow constable, a stocky, rather fat man called Theobald. Both were clutching their long staves and staring down at something on the ground.

The ‘something’ turned out to be a spectacle that could have been used for a church wall-painting depicting the expected terrors of hell for those who sinned. A man’s body lay on its back in the weeds, a molehill under his shoulders throwing the head back to expose a ghastly wound that occupied the whole of his neck, from jawline to collarbones. Most of his face and the upper part of his body was plastered in dried blood, the colour of his tunic being apparent only below his waist. His grey hair was thick with blackening blood clot, and the front end of a deep laceration was just visible above his left ear.

What was even more macabre than his horrific injuries was lying alongside his outstretched right hand. Here a complete tongue and attached voice-box was carefully laid out on a bloody stone, like some piece of offal displayed on a butcher’s stall.