The Witch Hunter Page 30

  De Wolfe jerked his head at Gwyn. ‘Let’s see what the women have to say about this.’

  Before they left the room, the Cornishman drew his attention to a dagger lying on the floor, near Henry’s left leg. He bent to pick it up and held it out to his master. ‘Must be his, his scabbard is empty.’ He turned it over in his hand. ‘But there’s not a drop of blood on it and the blade is too wide to have caused that wound. Besides, this has two cutting edges, so it couldn’t have slit the skin like that, with one blunt end to the wound.’ As usual, he competed with his master over their expertise in the interpretation of lethal injuries.

  John shrugged. ‘I didn’t think he had stabbed himself anyway,’ he said, moving to the door.

  In the other room, beyond a heavy hide flap that closed off the doorway, they found Cecilia de Pridias on a stool, slumped over a table, with her daughter Avise standing alongside her, looking defiant and defensive. Cecilia raised her head and showed reddened, tear-laden eyes. John suspected that her weeping was not for the man lying in the other room, but for fear of her own predicament. ‘He attacked me, Sir John! He came here demanding that we give up our business to him. The very man who brought about the death of my dear husband!’ Her voice was quavering, but still held anger.

  ‘Why should he do that, if he came to do business, however unwelcome?’ asked John, trying keep the sarcasm out of his voice. This was the woman who had helped to hound four women to their deaths.

  ‘Because she told the swine what she thought of him,’ spat Avise, her eyes glittering with hatred. ‘He killed my father for the business and he tried to do the same to my mother.’

  ‘Just tell me what happened,’ said John patiently. ‘Were you there all the time?’

  ‘I was indeed,’ replied the daughter. ‘De Hocforde became abusive when my mother continued to refuse to have any dealings with him and when she loudly accused him of bringing about my father’s death by having a curse placed upon him. He became angry and violent and pulled out his dagger, waving it about.’

  This sounded unlikely, but de Wolfe kept his temper. ‘Madame, your husband did not die as a result of magic.’

  The fury that Cecilia had held for Henry de Hocforde now transferred itself to the coroner, for confounding her beliefs. ‘You have kept trading me that lie from the beginning! I tell you, he did not die of a seizure!’ she shouted.

  ‘I agree with you,’ said John. ‘I now believe that he was deliberately poisoned with sugar of lead.’

  Cecilia’s rage collapsed like a pig’s bladder pierced with a needle. She stared at him open mouthed. ‘Poisoned? By whom?’

  ‘The apothecary, Walter Winstone – though he is now in no position to admit or deny it.’

  The sharp-witted widow rapidly collected her senses. ‘Then it was at the behest of de Hocforde, if you are right. Why else should an apothecary want to kill a good customer?’

  De Wolfe did not want to be sidetracked from the stabbing. ‘How did he come to be injured?

  The daughter broke in rapidly here, too quickly for John’s liking. ‘We told you, he burst into a flaming temper and advanced on my mother with his dagger. I screamed, but there were no servants within earshot and my brave mother was forced to pick up the knife she used to cut threads for her embroidery to defend herself.’

  ‘He stumbled in his rage and fell upon the blade that I was holding out to ward him off. My knife was very sharp, it has to be for the work it does.’ Cecilia pointed to a corner of the room, where a small, narrow knife lay on the floor, its blade red with blood.

  De Wolfe thought the whole story a complete tissue of lies, but Avise stoutly supported her mother. ‘I saw it all, it was just as she described,’ she said vehemently. ‘He is a violent madman, who uses violence to get whatever he desires. My mother was in fear of her life and was defending herself!’

  They both stuck resolutely to their version of events, and John saw that it was pointless to keep badgering them at the moment. ‘We’ll see what the victim has to say about it,’ he grunted and took Gwyn back with him to the other room. It was much too soon to expect any sign of Osric coming back with Brother Saul and they found Thomas solicitously holding a cup of brandy-wine to the lips of the mortally injured man.

  ‘I thought it might help him,’ muttered Roger, who looked very uneasy at the situation, with his wife and mother-in-law obviously lying through their teeth.

  John crouched again by the victim’s side and saw that his pallor had worsened and that his breathing was becoming more rapid and shallow. Although he was no physician, he had attended enough mortally injured men to recognise the agonal stages. He felt Henry’s pulse, which was thready and feeble. Thomas, who also knew a dying man when he saw one, looked up quizzically at the coroner and murmured that they needed a priest.

  ‘You are a priest, man – or soon will be again! Do what is necessary or it will be too late. But let me speak to him first.’

  He bent over Henry and spoke his name in a firm voice, asking whether he could understand him. Somewhat to his surprise, de Hocforde rolled his eyes towards him and nodded. ‘Am I dying?’ he whispered.

  John felt under no obligation to lie. ‘Yes, Henry. We have sent for a physician, but I have no doubt that you will soon be in the next world.’

  The man gave a faint sigh and closed his eyes. ‘I have brought it upon myself. Greed has laid me low.’ His lids rose again and he looked at Thomas. ‘Is that a priest there?’

  ‘Yes, he will be with you at the last. But now that you accept that you have no hope of living, have you anything to tell me? About your dealings with the de Pridias family or Walter Winstone?’

  De Wolfe was being legally correct, as a dying declaration was valid in a court only if the victim had no expectation of survival, when the law assumed that it was the truth. There was a silence, then another whisper, though it was clearly heard in the quiet room.

  ‘I paid that knave of an apothecary well to do away with Robert de Pridias, but he was useless. I had to employ a sorcerer to curse him to death.’

  ‘And who was that?’ asked John grimly, avoiding putting a name into the man’s mouth.

  ‘Elias Trempole, God rest him.’

  ‘And did you have him and the apothecary killed?’

  There was another pause and sweat appeared on the pallid brow of the dying man. ‘I had to do it. Winstone was threatening to expose me. Trempole had to go too.’

  ‘And who did you employ to slay them?’

  ‘Hugh Furrel – but the fool made it too obvious that the deaths were related. I have been dogged by fools all along.’

  He gave a sudden cough and closed his eyes again.

  ‘He’s going soon, master,’ Thomas warned, and started to administer the last rites. These included the seven interrogations required by the Church to ensure that the dying person was a true believer and sincerely regretted his sins in order to obtain the final absolution – but it was too late. Although Henry was still alive, his brain had faded from want of blood and Thomas got no response. However, he continued to recite the Latin monologue of extreme unction and when Saul arrived a few minutes later was still doing so, with Henry’s heart still beating, albeit little more than a flicker.

  John abandoned the task of getting more information and went out into the street with Gwyn.

  ‘We’ll never know now, will we?’ grunted the ginger giant. He looked at his master with a sly grin. ‘You asked him all about his crimes first, Crowner. Maybe if you’d started with who stabbed him, we’d know now.’

  John scowled at him. ‘Are you accusing me of something, you old devil? I don’t like that malicious old bitch in there, but that bastard Hocforde had no less than three people murdered to suit his own ends.’ They stood waiting for Saul and Thomas to come out to tell them that the mill-master was finally dead. ‘At least we can clear up a few unfinished inquests now. I’ll leave the widow Cecilia to God and her conscience, if she possesses one!’

  By
noon, when like most people, he took the main meal of the day, John was again alone in his hall. Mary said that Matilda had gone off in a sombre mood to pray at the cathedral, a sure sign of the seriousness of her devotions.

  He ate in solitary silence, apart from the panting Brutus, who sat slavering under the table, waiting for scraps. It was a scorching day outside and the old hound felt the heat – as did many a manor bailiff and village reeve, looking hopefully towards their fields of grain.

  A man bleeding to death made no difference to John’s appetite and he made short work of a wooden bowl filled with mutton stew, taking his small eating knife from his belt to spear the solid lumps and drinking the liquid with a horn spoon. A piece of boiled salmon followed, all too common a fish on most dinner tables but by Matilda’s orders, strictly limited to once a week in the de Wolfe household. Some dried figs and raisins made up the dessert, brought back from Normandy on one of the ships that had taken a cargo of their wool to Caen.

  His stomach satisfied and his mind glad of some peace without his wife glowering at him across the hearth, he sat and finished another pint of ale, while Brutus crunched contentedly on a piece of bone that John had fished out of his stew. He stared unseeingly at a faded tapestry hanging on the opposite wall, which vaguely depicted some biblical scene, as his mind reviewed the events of the last day or two.

  The Bush was destroyed, but already its rebuilding was in hand. Nesta was safe and could remain out of sight until this present madness had been resolved. It looked as if Gilbert de Bosco’s obsessive campaign was grinding to a halt, if the archdeacon’s view that the bishop no longer had any stomach for it was correct. The burgesses weighing in with their concerns about the effect the unrest was having on commerce was also significant, as they were a powerful lobby, which even the Church could not totally ignore.

  The death of Henry de Hocforde was something of a side issue now, but at least it cleared up a few murders and unfinished inquests. John doubted that they would ever see Hugh Furrel again, but if he showed his face in Devon he could now be hanged fairly rapidly.

  The unknown quantity was still outstanding – the matter of Richard de Revelle. Although his cumulative misdeeds were enough to have him dancing at the end of a rope, he was a slippery customer and his fate depended partly on how heavily his powerful friends would weigh against the attitude of the King’s men in Winchester. If Hubert Walter was away and some lesser chancery clerk or a minor baron dealt with the message that John had sent, then perhaps very little would happen. De Wolfe scowled to himself at the awful thought that no significant censure would come back from Winchester and that the sheriff would remain in office to crow over John and make his life unbearable. If that happened, John vowed that he would either ride off with Gwyn to find a war somewhere – or elope with Nesta and go and live in Wales.

  He prayed that the Chief Justiciar would send someone with sufficient clout to attend to the situation in Exeter – at least one of the Justices of Eyre or a member of the Curia Regis.

  If Richard de Revelle was ejected from office, there would be the problem of a successor, perhaps a temporary caretaker until King Richard could be consulted as to his permanent representative in the county. The last time that Richard de Revelle had been ousted from the shrievalty, back at the time of the Prince’s rebellion in ’93, his place as sheriff had been taken by Henry de Furnellis, an elderly knight from Exeter. His father, Alan de Furnellis, had been sheriff twenty years earlier, but had died in office within a year. Henry was a dull, pompous man who did as little as possible to exert himself, but as far as John knew he was honest, which would be a welcome change in a county sheriff. If de Revelle was ousted, then he grudgingly accepted that de Furnellis would be acceptable as a stopgap, at least until a better long-term candidate could be found.

  His musings were interrupted by voices in the vestibule outside and he half expected it to be the usual visit by Gwyn informing him that some new corpse had been found or a woman had been ravished. But Mary put her head around the screens to announce that Adam the carpenter had called to see him. John went out to the vestibule to meet the stocky, almost bald craftsman, who stood holding a hessian sack in his hands.

  ‘I got my journeyman and two apprentices to start clearing the wreckage as soon as you left, Crowner,’ he explained. ‘And almost straight away, when they dragged off the main ridge beam, I saw this lying among the ashes.’

  With Mary and Lucille peeping in horrified fascination around the corner of the passageway, Adam Kempe upended the sack and tipped the contents out on to the beaten earth floor of the vestibule. Amid a shower of charred wood fragments and burnt straw, a blackened skull and several fragmented bones spilled across the ground. The skull had burned through over much of the cranium and what was left was fragile and brittle, as were several segments of leg bone and some vertebrae.

  ‘There were more bits there, but we thought this was enough to show you. The lads are collecting the rest of the poor old hag as they move away the rest of the debris,’ said the carpenter, with morbid satisfaction.

  John bent and picked up the skull, turning it over in his hands. The best-preserved parts were the few teeth that were left in the old woman’s jaws, though even they were blackened and cracked.

  ‘Well, at least the inquest jury will have something to view!’ grunted the coroner. ‘It’s too late to arrange today and tomorrow’s Sunday, so it will have to be on Monday. Whoever found this will have to attend the inquest. I’ll hold it in the Shire Hall at Rougemont.’

  He scooped up the bone remnants and dropped them back into the sack. Adam departed, leaving Mary to cluck her tongue at having to clean up a pile of ash and some small fragments of Bearded Lucy from her clean vestibule floor.

  The next day Matilda was still subdued and hardly spoke a word to her husband, except to ask him civilly whether he would accompany her to church that morning. Feeling sorry for her low spirits and unaccountably slightly guilty – although he knew no real reason why he should be – he agreed and, both dressed in black, they walked to St Olave’s, where he endured a long-winded Mass and an oration from Julian Fulk. He was thankful that at least the unctuous priest had dropped the witchcraft theme and suspected that John de Alençon had been firmly countermanding the edicts of Gilbert de Bosco on that score.

  However, that particular canon seemed undeterred and had thrust himself upon the priest at the church of St Petroc in the high street, almost belligerently announcing to the man that he would give the sermon today, as if this were some great favour.

  Having heard that the archdeacon had been undermining his crusade and in spite of learning of the bishop’s new coolness regarding the issue, Gilbert stubbornly persisted in his mission. However, still fermenting in the back of his mind was the image of the burning Lucy and her last words cursing him. Like John, he had a fleeting vision of something strange and unearthly at the moment the roof crashed upon the old woman, and he had been uneasy ever since. Each evening, he could not prevent himself from looking up at the sky and checking on the size of the moon, which was now at least three-quarters full.

  The previous day, he had felt a burning sensation around the back of his neck and by evening he had a hot red swelling chafing against the collar of his cassock. His steward had put hot clay poultices upon it, but by this morning he had four egg-sized lumps pouting under the skin and a visit to the cathedral infirmarian had confirmed his diagnosis of a series of boils, amounting to a carbuncle.

  ‘They’ll have to get more proud than this, before they burst!’ cackled the infirmarian, an old Benedictine who had been retired from Buckfast Abbey to look after the health of the Exeter ecclesiastics.

  Gilbert now had a long length of coarse flannel cloth wrapped around his neck, covering a foul sticky paste applied by the old monk. What with the heat of the day and the internal heat of the inflamed tissues, he was most uncomfortable and could hardly turn his head. He refused to believe that this was anything to do with the c
urse, but part of his mind could not help recalling the seven curses placed on Egypt in the Book of Exodus, one of which was a plague of boils.

  Worse was to come, and a genuine fear descended upon de Bosco, which only his deep faith managed to keep at bay. At St Petroc’s, when the time came for him to stand on the chancel steps and deliver his sermon on the iniquities of cunning women and their heresy and sacrilege, he suddenly felt a most peculiar feeling spreading down the left side of his body. He opened his mouth to speak, but it drooped down to one side, spittle running out of the corner. At the same time, he felt his left arm go numb and found he was unable to move it.

  Desperately afraid that he had suffered a seizure, he tried to speak, but only gargling noises came. The congregation, standing below him, looked on curiously until the parish priest, aware that something was wrong, came across and led him back to a chair at the side of the chancel. Here Gilbert sat in dizzy terror until the incumbent had rapidly brought the service to an end and dismissed the intrigued congregation.

  ‘You had better sit there awhile and I will send down to the Close for the infirmarian,’ ordered the priest. A few minutes later, the monk who had been treating his boils arrived and, after prodding the canon, pumping his arms and legs, then pushing up his lids to stare into his eyes, he suggested that a litter be sent for to carry de Bosco back to his house. By now Gilbert was feeling better and though his speech was still affected by the drooping lip and numb tongue, he had only a tingling sensation in his left arm and leg, their mobility appearing to be almost normal.

  ‘I can make my way upon my own feet, thank you,’ he mumbled ungraciously and, leaning on the infirmarian and his own steward, who had also been sent for, he managed to stumble back to Canons’ Row.

  For the rest of the day he lay on his bed, anxiety gnawing at him like a cancer, but as the hours went by, he seemed to recover almost completely, except for a slight floppiness of the left side of his mouth. The carbuncle progressed, however and the boils began to erupt like angry little volcanoes, oozing thick pus into the bandage around his neck. As he lay on his pallet late that evening, he could look out at the darkening sky through the window, unshuttered because of the heat. He dozed off and when he awoke a little later, he saw an egg-shaped moon, a little larger than the previous night, mocking him from above the cathedral towers.