Crowner Royal (Crowner John Mysteries) Read online

  ‘You have the ear of the Justiciar – and are known to be a favourite of the king himself, after the good service you gave him at the Crusade. When a spy is short of contacts, he or she latches on to the best option – and you are a good target in that respect.’

  De Wolfe stared at Ranulf in disbelief. ‘Are you trying to tell me that the de Seigneurs are covert agents of France?’

  The marshal shrugged. ‘It’s a possibility. I know that warnings have been circulating for months that there are spies in England.’

  ‘There are always spies in England – and always have been! Just as we have spies in France and every other country,’ said John scornfully.

  ‘I’m just repeating what I’ve heard,’ answered Ranulf mildly. ‘Perhaps Renaud de Seigneur plans to catch you pleasuring his wife, so that he can blackmail you into revealing the secrets of the realm!’ he added mischievously

  ‘He’ll be in for a great disappointment, then,’ grunted de Wolfe. ‘I’ve cuckolded better men than him.’

  Thinking it time that he turned the talk away from himself, he delved a little into his companion’s life.

  ‘What about you, friend? You cannot be married if you live in that bachelor den over the stables.’

  ‘I was wedded years ago, but my wife died in childbed, as did the infant.’

  ‘Have you not remarried, then? You are still young, not yet thirty, I would guess.’

  Ranulf shook his head. ‘I enjoy life as it is, John. I do not lack for female company when I desire it, but enjoy men’s pursuits, like gambling on dice, dog-fighting and the like. I also follow the tournaments in a modest way, though I can’t yet afford to equip myself sufficiently to enter the lists in any of the great tourneys.’

  John, who had also dabbled in jousting in his earlier days, knew of the passion that some men had for tourneys. Fortunes could be made – and lost – on the tourney fields, as the horses and armour of the losers were forfeited to the winners, as well as heavy wagering on the results.

  ‘What about young William Aubrey?’ asked John. ‘Is he another merry bachelor?’

  ‘He is indeed, never having married. But he is twenty-one and has little prospect of inheritance, as he is the fifth son of a manor-lord in Somerset.’ He grinned as he thought of William’s cheerful nature. ‘He is another keen one for the girls, but he has youth on his side. Also, he shares my fondness for a wager, though ratting is his game.’

  ‘You’ll both have to be on your best behaviour when the old queen arrives,’ observed de Wolfe. ‘All the organisation of travel is your responsibility, I gather.’

  Ranulf became serious at the prospect. ‘Yes, though under the direction of William the Marshal himself, when he arrives. We have half a dozen under-marshals here and a legion of ostlers, grooms, farriers and wheelwrights to keep the cavalcade on the road, once we leave Westminster.’

  They crossed the stream and entered the gate into Old Palace Yard. Just before they parted, John told him about Simon Basset, as the under-marshal was almost as involved as himself in the matter of the stolen treasure.

  ‘It’s not common knowledge yet, but Canon Simon seems to have disappeared,’ he said. ‘I wanted to question him about access to the chests in the Tower, but he appears to have vanished off the face of the earth. No one in his household or in the Exchequer has any news of him.’

  Ranulf’s expression showed his concern. ‘But along with the Constable, he’s the most likely suspect, given that he has at least half the keys necessary,’ he said. ‘Do you think he’s fled the country with a sack full of gold?’

  De Wolfe shrugged. ‘It seems a little unlikely that a respectable canon would give up his life in England for nine hundred pounds, though that’s a lot of money. And he’s left behind a valuable house and possessions, as well as a position of influence and prestige.’

  ‘Maybe he’s just having a few days and nights with a secret mistress,’ suggested Ranulf. They both laughed at the thought of the portly canon indulging in some passionate affair, but as John said farewell and walked off to meet Gwyn, he wondered whether that was a possible explanation.

  CHAPTER NINE

  In which Crowner John visits a brothel

  In an upstairs room of a house in Stinking Lane, just inside the city wall near Aldersgate, a man lay naked on a feather-filled mattress. He was not a pretty sight to begin with, having an over-rounded belly and pale, pasty limbs, but the fact that he was groaning and dry-retching into an earthenware basin, made him even less attractive to the two women who stood watching him from the doorway.

  ‘He’s been like this for the past hour,’ reported Lucy, a pretty but over-painted girl of about eighteen years, with brightly dyed red hair reaching down her back. She pressed a long green brocade pelisse tightly about her body, her arms folded across her full bosom.

  ‘Has he not done what he paid for?’ demanded the older woman, a raddled former beauty, whose faded blonde hair was tucked beneath a white cover-chief.

  Lucy shook her head, her eyes still on the man moaning on the pallet. ‘He got as far as taking off his garments, mistress, but then suddenly fell ill.’ She sounded as if it was a personal slight on her professional abilities that her client was unable to perform his duty.

  ‘He can’t stay here like this!’ snapped Margery of Edmonton, who ruled the bawdyhouse with a rod of iron. ‘If he dies on us, we’ll have the sheriff’s men here, frightening off other patrons, as well as expecting free favours for themselves.’

  The more sympathetic Lucy, who over many visits had developed a fondness for her normally amiable customer, leaned over the sufferer and tried to converse with him between bouts of retching.

  ‘Was it something you ate, sir? Have you taken bad meat very lately?’

  His eyes rolled upward and managed to focus on the face above him. ‘I supped at a good inn with …’ then his words tailed off as he tried to vomit again, though his stomach had nothing left.

  His face took on a ghastly pallor and sweat appeared on his brow as a rigor shook his body. ‘An apothecary – get me an apothecary!’ he managed to gasp before another bout of retching started.

  Lucy looked at her mistress, and then at two other girls, whose curiosity had brought them to peer into the room from the open doorway. ‘Can we send for Master Justin? He usually attends us girls when we have troubles,’ she asked hopefully.

  The madam of the house shook her head firmly. ‘I’ll not have people parading through the place. If our gentlemen wish to be indisposed, they must do it elsewhere.’

  ‘What are you going to do, then?’ asked one of the girls at the door, a strange-looking strumpet with a patently false blonde wig and red dabs of rouge on her cheeks.

  ‘Go and fetch Benedict and Luke. Tell one of them to call a chair in the street. We’ll get him taken away.’

  Lucy looked unhappy at this, but knew it was unwise and unprofitable to try to argue with the madam. ‘Where can he be taken?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s a cleric, so let him go to St Bartholomew’s. They have the best hospital in London, they can surely look after one of their own.’

  She waved a hand peremptorily at the other girl in the passage.

  ‘Come and help Lucy get some clothes on the fellow! At least he can be carried decently through the streets. And then call one of the slatterns to clear up this mess.’ She pointed at the bilious fluid on the floor alongside the mattress.

  With much groaning and piteous wailing from the priest, the two whores managed to force the sufferer’s limbs and body back into his hose, undershirt and long cassock. He seemed beyond any sensible speech now, his slack mouth dribbling saliva. The only words Lucy could distinguish as they wrestled his arms into his robe were ‘Green! Green and yellow – everything is yellow.’

  Now two hulking men arrived on the scene, their usual tasks being to throw out any drunken or over-perverted customers. They lifted the priest bodily from the pallet and with an ease born of long practice, carr
ied him down the stairs to the narrow lane. It was early evening and the streets around Aldersgate were relatively quiet. One of the thugs from the brothel had sent for a litter, a crude device with a wooden chair fixed to two poles, which a pair of porters manhandled for a small fee. Margery of Edmonton had grudgingly paid the two pence demanded, taking them from the purse attached to the canon’s belt, having again confirmed from Lucy that he had paid her his fee before falling ill.

  She watched with relief as the two porters jogged off along Stinking Lane towards the gate, with the limp form of the sick man precariously slumped in the chair. Walking back into the house, she scowled at the three girls as if it was their fault that they had been landed with a patron who looked as if he was at death’s door.

  ‘Make sure that room is cleared up at once,’ she snapped. ‘And tidy yourselves as well, we’re expecting some guildsmen from the Mercers within the hour!’

  On Tuesday morning, de Wolfe went at an early hour up to the house in King Street to see if there was any news of Canon Basset. A very worried chaplain and steward informed him that they had heard nothing at all, in spite of having servants scour the whole neighbourhood, including Westminster, Charing and up as far as the Holbourn in a fruitless search for any sign of their master or his horse.

  ‘I fear he has been waylaid by thieves and killed,’ wailed Gilbert, the chaplain. ‘There is no way in which he would have left us without word like this.’

  ‘Did he often go off without explanation?’

  The steward, Martin, shrugged. ‘He is the master, he has no need to tell us what he is doing,’ he answered. ‘But usually he will say when he expects to be home, so that the cook knows when to be ready with his meals. The canon was very fond of his food,’ he added sadly.

  John, with further admonitions for them to send him a message the moment they heard from Basset, left them to their morbid fears, though privately he thought they may well be right. Unless the Exchequer official had really fled with the stolen treasure, the coroner suspected that he had met with serious trouble somewhere – though whether this was connected with the theft of the gold, he could not guess.

  Back in his chamber in the palace, he was pleasantly distracted from the matter of the canon by a message which had been brought by a boatman on a wherry from Queenhithe, a wharf in the city. It was by word-of-mouth, but none the less welcome, for the man was from the crew of the Mary and Child Jesus, another of the cogs belonging to the consortium run by Hugh de Relaga and the two appropriately named sleeping partners, John de Wolfe and Hilda of Dawlish. In fact, it was the ship upon which Hilda’s husband had been murdered with all his crew the previous year.3 The Mary had left Topsham, a port on the estuary of the River Exe below Exeter, on the same day that the St Radegund had returned from London and the shipmaster had been charged with sending a message to de Wolfe to say that Mistress Hilda had arrived home safely.

  Given the hazards of travel, whether by land or sea, John was greatly relieved, though it increased his desire to make a visit to Devon as soon as he could manage to get there. He had not seen his own family for some time, either: his widowed mother, elder brother and sister lived on their main manor at Stoke-in-Teignhead, a few miles south of Dawlish, which was an added incentive to get back to that part of the county.

  When the boatman had gone, Thomas de Peyne arrived and in the absence of any inquest rolls to copy, he began the uphill task of teaching his master the rudiments of Latin. De Wolfe seemed to forget more than he ever learned and both were secretly relieved when they were interrupted by a page sent up by the doorward. It was not the usual fresh-faced infant, but a more scrawny, cheeky cock sparrow of a boy.

  ‘There’s a man down at the entrance, a fellow from the city,’ he said pertly, his head around the door. ‘He wanted to come up, but the porter wouldn’t let him.’

  ‘Where’s he from? And why does he want me?’ demanded John, annoyed at the boy’s lack of respect. The page shrugged indifferently. ‘Search me, sir! Do you want to come down and see him?’

  The coroner suddenly decided that his lessons were more important. ‘Go and see what he wants, Gwyn. If it’s an angry husband, tell him I’m gone to Cathay!’ he added facetiously, still pleased with the news of Hilda.

  Gwyn ambled off, giving the page a playful cuff across the head for his impertinence, while John tried to concentrate on Thomas’s recitation of Latin verbs. A few moments later the Cornishman returned.

  ‘You’d better hear what this fellow has to say, straight from the horse’s mouth,’ he announced, leading in a rough-looking man dressed in the buff tunic and hooded leather jerkin of a city constable. With a surly gesture that John took to be a salute, the man pulled off his woollen cap and began a short recitation that he had obviously committed to memory.

  ‘My master the sheriff says he reminds you of the agreement you all made before the Justiciar, and keeping his part he wishes to tell you that there is a dead man for you in the city.’

  He said this as if it were all one long word, not pausing for breath from start to finish. De Wolfe stared up at him from his place at the table.

  ‘Which sheriff are you talking about?’ he growled.

  ‘Sir Robert, who deals with corpses in Middlesex as well.’

  ‘You said it was in the city?’ cut in Thomas.

  The constable scowled at the diminutive clerk. ‘Well, Smithfield and St Bartholomew’s are but a few paces outside the gates – they might just as well be in the city for all the difference it makes.’

  ‘And why is fitz Durand handing this to me?’ asked John. On past experience, the jealousies of the city men would seem to be against spontaneous gestures like this.

  ‘The corpse is that of a holy man – and from what we hear, from Westminster.’

  A premonition seized de Wolfe, a not unreasonable one given the circumstances. ‘Do you know who he is?’

  The sheriff’s man shook his head, which seemed to grow straight out of his shoulders, without any neck. ‘Not me, Crowner, I’m but a messenger. He is in the care of the hospital at the priory of St Bartholomew, that’s all I know. My master says that you can do what you like, he doesn’t want to know about it.’

  It was soon clear that the man knew nothing more and cared even less, so de Wolfe dismissed him, with a message to take back to Robert fitz Durand. ‘Tell him that I am obliged for his courtesy and will attend to the matter straight away,’ he said curtly.

  After the fellow had gone, John rose to his feet, eager to get some action. ‘Is this going to be our missing Exchequer canon?’ he asked his two assistants, as he reached for his sword belt hanging on a nearby hook.

  ‘A holy man, that’s all he said,’ objected Gwyn. ‘God knows there are enough of those in these parts!’ He prodded Thomas playfully in the ribs, but for once the little clerk ignored his teasing.

  ‘If he’s in St Bartholomew’s, perhaps he was taken ill with a palsy or a trepidation of the heart,’ suggested Thomas.

  ‘Then let’s go and find out!’ snapped the coroner, buckling on his belt and pulling the diagonal strap of his baldric over his right shoulder. ‘Anything is better than sitting around here yawning!’

  They rode around the north-western corner of the walls, not needing to enter the city to reach Smithfield, where the great priory of St Bartholomew overlooked the barren heath used for cattle and horse sales, as well as for the butchery of animals and men. Outside the priory was the execution ground for the city, the notorious Smithfield elms being used as gallows, and where burning at the stake was carried out.

  ‘Odd place for the biggest hospital in England,’ grumbled Gwyn as they tied their horses to a hitching rail under the watchful eye of a gate porter. ‘Why put one outside a cattle market?’

  The ever-knowing Thomas was ready with an answer. ‘Because seventy years ago, the first King Henry gave the land for it, that’s why.’

  ‘Gave it to who? And why?’ persisted the Cornish-man. De Wolfe was not su
re if his officer was thirsting for knowledge or just trying to aggravate his clerk.

  ‘The king gave it to a Frankish monk called Rahere, who some say was previously his court jester,’ pontificated Thomas. ‘Rahere was an Augustinian who fell sick on pilgrimage to Rome. He swore that if he recovered from his fever, he would build a hospital in London in thankfulness.’

  ‘So why St Bartholomew?’ asked de Wolfe, as they walked towards the arched entrance into the large walled enclosure. ‘Wasn’t he the apostle who was flayed alive?’

  Thomas nodded eagerly. ‘You are indeed a learned man, master! But the monk Rahere named his hospital and priory after the island in the Tiber on which was the hospital that saved his life in Rome.’

  The history lesson over, the coroner loped to the doorkeeper’s lodge inside the gates and made himself known to the lay brother inside.

  ‘The sheriff has informed me that a cleric, possibly from Westminster, was brought here and died yesterday.’

  John dangled his precious piece of parchment with the impressive seal before the man’s eyes. It had the desired effect, though as usual the doorkeeper was unable to read it. ‘I need to see the corpse and then question whoever dealt with the poor fellow.’

  The lay brother, dressed in a shapeless black habit, hastened to help the imposing visitor.

  ‘I did hear that a priest had died, sir. No doubt his body is in the dead-house behind the hospital. I will have to enquire as to who treated him, for we have eleven monks who care for the sick, as well as four sisters of mercy.’

  He rose from his table and yelled at a young boy who was squatting outside the door, scratching marks in the dust with a stick. ‘Elfed, take these gentlemen over to the mortuary, then come back here.’

  The coroner’s trio followed the lad across the huge enclosure, where each August, England’s largest cloth fair was held, with a horse fair outside on the heath. They had the impressive pile of the priory to their left, its large church towering over cloisters, dorter, refectory, chapter house and a small chapel. The usual infirmary was missing, however, as the place had been established specifically as a hospital, which lay to their right. Several stone-built wards lay at the southern end of the great yard, together with some storage and accommodation for the nursing nuns, who like the brothers, were of the Augustinian order.