A Plague of Heretics (Crowner John Mysteries) Read online

  He pulled the folds of his black cloak around him and walked out into the misty Close.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In which Crowner John’s faith is challenged

  In spite of Gwyn’s anxiety about John riding alone to Stoke, the journey was uneventful. A weak sun had burned off the mist before mid-morning, and he reached his brother’s manor by noon, even though his heavy destrier Odin was appreciably slower than a rounsey or a palfrey.

  Before leaving Exeter, he had called at St John’s Priory to see Thomas and found him in much the same state as the previous day, still feverish and restless. Though he would not respond sensibly to any questions or seem to recognise his master, at least he was no worse. Brother Saulf was noncommittal about his prospects, saying that some victims of the yellow distemper had recovered rapidly, while others had deteriorated after a good start. They prayed together over his pallet, John shedding his indifference about his religious belief in a genuine and heartfelt effort to persuade God to save this good little priest.

  When he arrived at Stoke, he did much the same thing, as William was also in the same state as before, though the fever seemed to have subsided. He was even more yellow than on the previous visit, but Enyd, anxious to grasp at any shred of hope, reported that he had been passing slightly more water and that they had managed to force a fair quantity of water past his cracked lips. As with Thomas, he was semi-conscious and perhaps even more unreactive to any attempts to rouse him. At the table where Enyd had prepared her usual copious meal, she commiserated with John over Thomas’s affliction by the same hateful illness, for like most people she was very fond of his clerk, who had visited them several times. Then she passed stoically to the almost unthinkable possibility that her son might die.

  ‘The two manors are being run well enough for the present by the bailiffs and reeves, but what will become of us if we lose William?’ she asked tremulously. ‘He is such a good husbandman, for the crops, the livestock and the forest. Our servants, faithful though they are, cannot plan and organise in that way, and I am sure that neither Evelyn nor I have nearly enough knowledge to run an estate.’

  John laid a comforting hand on his mother’s sleeve.

  ‘Do not seek problems before they arise, for I feel it in my bones that William will survive. But should the worst happen, I will come here to live, at least for much of the time, though I cannot pretend to have as much skill as my brother. I would have to find a competent steward to assist us, as happens in so many manors where there are absentee lords.’

  His sister Evelyn, looking drained and weary from her ceaseless nursing of the sick in the village, as well as of her brother, dabbed her eyes with a kerchief.

  ‘We only wish you could have been wedded to Hilda, though we realise that it would not have been possible in the old days, with her the daughter of one of our own reeves. But now she is a rich and independent woman, you could have brought her here to live.’

  De Wolfe smiled bleakly. ‘If only we had the gift of reading the future! So much would have been done differently.’

  He told them of his latest spat with Matilda, which was more serious than ever before. ‘She is like a millstone around my neck, my penance for all I have done wrong in my life,’ he said sadly. ‘Now she claims I intend to harm her, which is far from the truth, much as I dislike her.’

  ‘You have not seen Hilda lately?’ asked Enyd, who also would have liked her for a daughter-in-law in place of Matilda de Revelle, who always treated the Stoke family with disdain.

  ‘I have been afraid to risk taking the distemper to her, though Dawlish already must be a vulnerable place, if it is true that it is being brought in on the ships.’

  Enyd de Wolfe leaned to kiss her son on his forehead. ‘You are a good man, John, but I think you should go to see Hilda. This foul affliction is so erratic in its attacks that I think it is pointless trying to avoid it. We have had no more victims in the village, and Holcombe had none at all, like Dawlish.’

  So when he left Stoke in the early afternoon, John took his mother’s advice and knocked on Hilda’s sturdy front door. When little Alice opened it, he was going to tell her to ask her mistress if she wished to risk seeing him, but suddenly Hilda appeared and threw her arms about his neck, dragging him inside. Sending the giggling maid for wine and pastries, John’s mistress pulled him by the hand up to her solar and, until Alice’s feet were heard on the stairs, they kissed hungrily, grasping each other as tightly as if they wished to fuse their bodies together.

  Soon, they were sitting decorously opposite each other on folding chairs, sipping the good wine that her late husband had brought back from France. Alice perched inconspicuously on a stool in the corner, watching with fascination as her beautiful blonde mistress was so obviously captivated by this forbidding, black-haired man who reminded her of some huge bird of prey.

  Hilda listened to his sad news about both his brother and Thomas, but told him to have hope for them both.

  ‘I have been praying constantly for Lord William,’ she said. ‘And now I shall do the same for poor Thomas, bless him. I am sure that God will not want to take such a good soul to heaven so soon.’

  Unlike John, the blonde Saxon was very devout and was a pillar of faith and charity in Dawlish, where she looked after the well-being of a number of widows and families who had lost their ship-men husbands and fathers at sea, including those who had been murdered along with her husband Thorgils on his ship the previous year.

  Hilda listened gravely to John’s sour description of Matilda’s increasing intransigence. ‘She is such an unhappy soul, poor woman,’ she said. ‘But I wish she would not spread her bitterness all about her like a black cloud.’

  Though de Wolfe would dearly have liked to have stayed with Hilda, preferably all night, the various troubles that assailed him seemed to tell both of them that this was not the right time. Soon he reluctantly made his farewell, promising Hilda that he would call each time he made the journey to Stoke. He walked to the inn, where Odin was being fed and watered, and hauled himself into the saddle.

  As he trotted gently towards Exeter, he managed to drag his thoughts away from William and Thomas to wonder how the inquisition in the cathedral had gone that day. If he had not been so preoccupied with other problems, he supposed that he should have attended, in case any of the alleged heretics had confessed to any knowledge that might have helped in his investigation of the murders, though he thought that unlikely. He decided to go down later to see his friend the archdeacon, to hear what had transpired, but his priority was to visit Thomas, and when he reached the city he forced his big stallion through the crowded, narrow streets straight up to St John’s Hospital.

  He found Gwyn already there, crouched by the mattress, with Saulf standing at the foot. John’s first thought was that something terrible had happened, but then he saw his officer’s lips moving beneath his great moustache and, looking at his clerk’s face, he was overjoyed to see that his eyes were open.

  He dropped to his knees and bent over the little priest.

  ‘Thomas, can you hear me? How are you?’ It seemed an inane question, but it produced a result.

  ‘I have felt better, Crowner,’ whispered the clerk. ‘But I will be back at my duties as soon as I am able.’

  John, rugged soldier that he was, felt two beads of moisture appear in his eyes as he gave Thomas’s shoulder a gentle squeeze, then climbed to his feet.

  ‘Is this a miracle, brother?’ he asked Saulf.

  The Benedictine gave a gentle smile. ‘I would like to think so, but every recovery is a miracle wrought by the Almighty. I told you that there are different degrees of severity of this yellow distemper, from rapid death to rapid cure.’

  John looked down at Thomas and at Gwyn, who was looking as delighted as if he had found a barrel of gold pieces.

  ‘Will he recover completely now?’ he asked the monk.

  ‘Only God knows, but I see no reason why he should not,’ answered Saul
f. ‘He needs to expel all the yellow humour from his blood, which will take some days, but we will care for him here until that happens. He needs to rest and rebuild his strength.’

  Taking the hint, John murmured his goodbyes to Thomas with a promise to visit him often, then motioned to Gwyn to leave their clerk in peace. On the way out, de Wolfe emptied his purse into Saulf s hand, with fervent thanks and instructions to purchase whatever was needed for Thomas’s care. Outside, after celebrating Thomas’s withdrawal from the brink of death, John asked Gwyn if anything had happened during the day.

  ‘There’s been an affray out near Honiton – two killed in a robbery, but both miscreants captured after the hue and cry caught up with them,’ reported his officer.

  ‘We’ll have to go out there in the morning. Without Thomas to take a record, I’ll have to borrow one of the sheriff’s clerks. Anything else? What about this business at the cathedral?’

  Gwyn ran a hand through his tangled ginger hair. ‘I don’t know what went on inside the chapter house, but there was a hell of a fuss afterwards!’ he chuckled. ‘They released those five men, but a crowd outside took against them and chased them out of the city. I can’t see our fishmonger selling any more herrings in Exeter for a long time.’

  As Gwyn enlarged on his story, John gathered that a mob had assembled in the Close and had started yelling abuse at the men as they left the chapter house. On leaving the Close, more protesters gathered and started jostling and punching the alleged heretics.

  ‘Didn’t the bailiffs or constables intervene?’ demanded John.

  ‘It seems that the proctors’ men just stood back and did nothing while the mob was inside the cathedral precinct – outside, Osric and Theobald tried to keep order, but they had no chance against a hundred angry townsmen and women – in fact, the women were worse than their menfolk. Someone said that even that doctor who lives near you was there, shouting and shaking his fists!’

  ‘That man is half-crazed! So then what happened?’

  ‘The crowd got bigger as they went down Fore Street – it fed on itself. I suspect half the mob didn’t know what they were rioting about, anyway; they were just itching for a fight. But the poor men from Ide had a rough time until they reached the West Gate, where the crowd seemed to lose interest in them. They were bruised and bleeding by then. It’s a wonder we haven’t got a corpse to deal with!’

  ‘What happened to Adam the fisherman? I thought he lived in the city.’

  Gwyn shrugged. ‘I heard nothing more of him. Maybe he’s lying dead in a gutter in Bretayne.’

  De Wolfe put a foot in a stirrup and hoisted himself up into Odin’s deep saddle. ‘I’ll see what John de Alençon has to say later this evening,’ he promised. With another fervent thanks to God for Thomas’s deliverance, he rode away, hoping against hope that a similar miracle would be granted down at Stoke-in-Teignhead.

  The house in Martin’s Lane was empty and, though Mary had a fire burning in the hall, it was too cavernous and bleak for him to sit eating alone. He went around to her kitchen-shed, as he had done many times before, and ate at her small table. He told her his news and, as he expected, she was delighted to hear that Thomas seemed mercifully delivered from the fear of death.

  ‘Any word from your mistress?’ he asked.

  ‘She has gone to her brother’s house, as you know. Lucille came around earlier to fetch some more of her clothes from her chests in the solar, but there was no message.’

  John gnawed the last of the meat from a chicken leg. ‘I wonder who’ll get tired of each other’s presence first,’ he asked, ‘Matilda or Richard?’

  ‘Probably Eleanor de Revelle. She and the mistress are hardly best friends,’ grinned Mary. Richard’s icy and aloof wife considered that her own father had chosen too far down the social scale when he married her off into the de Revelle family. John washed his food down with some cider.

  ‘So where can she go then? Polsloe won’t take her in for the third time, I’m sure. She said she was going to batten herself on those poor bloody cousins in Normandy, but unless she is quick there’ll be no ships sailing until the spring.’

  Mary, in spite of suffering years of indignities and harsh words from Matilda, usually tried to heal the frequent breaches between John and his wife.

  ‘You had better crawl around to North Gate Street tomorrow and try to make your peace with her,’ she advised. ‘That’s what she’ll be waiting for, and the sooner you grasp the nettle the better.’

  Reluctantly, he agreed, as his sense of duty to a wife, however objectionable she might be, sat awkwardly on his conscience as he enjoyed the freedom her absence gave him.

  After his supper he set out in the dusk to see his friend the archdeacon and again met his next-door neighbours as soon as he set foot outside his door. They seemed to be almost as bad as Matilda for beating a frequent path to and from either the cathedral or St Olave’s Church.

  With the weather slightly warmer, Cecilia had discarded her fur-lined cloak and was attractively arrayed in a green woollen pelisse over her gown and a flowing cover-chief of white silk. The physician also wore a green mantle, his head encased in a close-fitting coif of crimson linen. He greeted John politely but made to walk on, whereas his wife stopped impulsively to enquire after his brother.

  ‘He is much the same, perhaps slightly improved,’ replied John, thanking her for her solicitude. ‘My clerk also fell victim to the yellow plague several days ago, but thank God is rapidly recovering. No doubt the power of prayer was responsible!’ he added, trying not to sound too sarcastic as he stared at Clement. This seemed to animate Exeter’s only doctor.

  ‘Never underestimate its power, Sir John!’ he declaimed. ‘I have been praying for the downfall of those evil blasphemers who were arraigned today at the cathedral. Did you hear that they were run out of the city by decent Christians?’

  ‘I heard that they were set upon by an unruly mob! I must discuss with the sheriff and the portreeves how best these illegal riots can be prevented in the future.’

  Clement became quite incensed. ‘I cannot imagine why you have any sympathy for these evil men, Crowner!’ he snapped. ‘It was emphasised in the chapter house today that the secular authorities are bound to assist the Church in every way in bringing these blasphemers to justice!’

  De Wolfe was unmoved, especially by this physician who seemed woefully short of sympathy for his fellow men.

  ‘I will do everything that the law requires, if and when they are deemed guilty by a competent court,’ he observed.

  If the twilight was not so dark, Clement’s face would have shown his angry flush.

  ‘Surely your duty to God to preserve His Kingdom on earth comes before any duty to petty mortal laws!’ he hissed. ‘These agents of Satan wish to pull down the very foundations of the Holy Church, whose doctrines have been so painstakingly constructed over a thousand years! They should be exterminated, like pouring a boiling kettle over an ants’ nest!’

  John was in no mood to debate theology with someone who was so obviously obsessed with eliminating anyone who challenged the status quo.

  ‘I’m afraid I have no say in these matters, sir. I am only a royal servant who does what King Richard and his justices expect of me.’

  He bobbed his head to the doctor and smiled at Cecilia, who had stood uneasily during this exchange with her husband, then he turned on his heel and stalked away towards Canon’s Row. A few minutes later he was sitting in de Alençon’s bare chamber, with the inevitable goblet of good wine. The archdeacon was aware that his nephew Thomas was recovering, as several times he had called at the priory to see him.

  ‘He’s a tough little fellow, in spite of the hard times he has suffered in recent years,’ he observed. ‘He has often told me how much he owes you for saving his sanity and his life.’

  De Wolfe told him of his brother’s serious condition and found that de Alençon was yet another who had been praying for William, so hopefully the barrage of s
upplications to heaven might prove effective.

  ‘Now what about today, John?’ asked the coroner of his namesake. ‘I suppose nothing came out in the proceedings which might give me some clue as to who is responsible for these deaths?’

  The archdeacon shook his head. ‘It was not that sort of enquiry, my friend. It was merely an attack by my colleagues on these fellows and an equally persistent denial of any wrongdoing by them.’

  ‘They denied they were heretics?’

  ‘No, but they claimed their right to practise as Christians in the way they thought best.’

  De Wolfe sensed that de Alençon was torn between his ingrained lifelong acquiescence to Rome and his personal sense of tolerance. ‘So what was the final outcome?’ he demanded.

  ‘Little better than chaos, John! My brother canons persisted in their inflexible condemnation, and like a lot of sheep virtually every vicar, secondary and even choirboy was infected by their enthusiasm.’

  He paused to fortify himself with a sip of Loire red. ‘Robert de Baggetor and the others even tried to force my hand, to convert this enquiry into a trial and to send those men to your secular powers for punishment. I refused, as I don’t want their blood on my hands. Let the bishop deal with it.’

  ‘So they’ve gone home?’

  The archdeacon raised his hands in exasperation. ‘They were chased out, as far as I could see. A mob was waiting for them and pursued them. I feared for their lives, quite honestly.’

  De Wolfe was puzzled. ‘These men were already known to many; that’s how the proctors’ spies picked them out. They’ve not been attacked before – apart from the three who were killed – so why should a mob suddenly set upon them?’

  The archdeacon smiled wryly. ‘It would not surprise me if the proctors’ men did not pass the word – and a few coins – around to some who enjoy mayhem and persecution. Others will soon follow suit once some leading voice shouts loud enough.’