A Plague of Heretics (Crowner John Mysteries) Read online

  He declined the offer of a meal, saying that as it was approaching noon he would soon have to go back to Martin’s Lane, where Mary, his cook-maid, would have prepared his dinner.

  As Martha moved away to greet her other patrons with her easy manner, de Wolfe was reminded of how Nesta used to do the same, both of them able to chaff and tease their customers without giving offence, but also capable of dealing firmly with those who had drunk too much and became either overfamiliar or aggressive. The thought of his former Welsh mistress made him pensive for a moment, as she so often used to share this very same bench with him, as well as the little room directly overhead in the loft, where they had spent so many tender and passionate hours.

  Suddenly, Gwyn was looming over him, rubbing his spade-like hands on a cloth. ‘Sure you’ll not have a bite to eat, Crowner?’

  John shook his head, then sniffed at a strong smell of ale that exuded from his officer. ‘God’s bones, man, have you been drinking the inn dry? I thought you were still up at the castle?’

  The ginger giant grinned. ‘I’ve just come back down to start off a new tub of mash. Haven’t touched a drop of ale since breakfast! What you smell is the fruit of my new career – apart from being the coroner’s officer,’ he added hastily. ‘My good wife has appointed me brew-master. A job made for me in heaven!’

  He explained how he was now in charge of making the ale, except when called away on coroner’s duties. ‘I’m sticking to the recipe that dear Nesta used to use. Everyone says she made the best ale in Exeter, so I see no reason to change.’

  Once again, the spectre of the woman he had loved rose up, but John was nothing if not a realist. Hilda of Dawlish was equally dear to him now, and the very thought of her made him eager to throw himself on to his horse and canter off down to the coast to see her. Even the dozen miles that separated them were far too many. She refused to move to Exeter, even though he could well afford to find another house for her. Matilda was entrenched in Martin’s Lane, so he seemed doomed to pound the road to Dawlish, back and forth like the shuttle in a loom.

  His reverie was broken when he realised that Gwyn was talking to him again.

  ‘I’ve just heard a rumour that some folks down in Bretayne have fallen sick with the yellow plague. If that’s true, then it’s getting uncomfortably close to us.’ John noticed that the low murmur of talk in the taproom had suddenly altered. There seemed to be a wave of more urgent conversation sweeping across the few dozen customers, people huddling closer to hear the news brought in by a couple of porters who had just arrived.

  ‘Are we keeping clear of it, if there are deaths, Crowner?’ asked Gwyn, worried about his wife and two young sons.

  ‘Unless there’s anything untoward about any of them,’ said John reassuringly. Though there was no written law on the matter, the vague declaration of the king’s justices in September two years ago, which had set up the office of coroner, had been refined piecemeal by the judges ever since when problems had arisen. It seemed clear that while murder, accident, suicide and sudden or suspicious deaths fell within the coroner’s purview, the majority of deaths from obvious disease or old age were excluded, as long as they occurred in the presence of the family. A few of the men in the ale-room were now rising and making for the door, with worried expressions on their faces.

  ‘Best get home and warn my wife and daughters,’ said one as he passed, a shoemaker whom John recognised. ‘Tell them to keep indoors until we know the truth of this tale.’

  De Wolfe could well appreciate how easily panic could spread in a closed city like Exeter, where more than four thousand people were packed together inside a few acres within the walls. He downed the rest of his ale and got to his feet.

  ‘Perhaps that’s good advice, Gwyn,’ he said. ‘Keep your boys at home for now, until we hear whether this is just some false rumour.’

  He realised that it was a rather futile gesture, given that Gwyn and his family lived in one of the most popular taverns in the city, where outsiders and strangers were coming and going all the time, possibly bringing contagion with them. Something Hugh de Relaga had said that morning came back to him.

  ‘Maybe I will have a word with that quack who’s come to live as my neighbour,’ he muttered as he swung his cloak about his shoulders and went out into the city streets, which suddenly seemed to have a menacing feel about them.

  Meal-times had never been a very cheerful occasion in the de Wolfe household, but since John had returned from Westminster they had all the charm of a funeral. Matilda, already in a chronic state of sulky depression, had been bitterly disappointed when her husband had voluntarily given up his appointment as Coroner of the Verge. At a stroke, she had been deprived of the chance to live at court and flaunt John’s position as coroner to the Royal Household, a position granted to him personally by King Richard – though John would have considered ‘thrust upon him’ more accurate than ‘granted’. Now, as they sat in the gloomy hall which occupied almost all of the high, narrow house in Martin’s Lane, she tried to behave as if her husband did not exist. Each sat at the opposite ends of the long oaken table, concentrating on the food brought in by Mary, the dark-haired young woman who was their cook and maid of all work about the house. Matilda had her own personal handmaiden, if such a title could be used for Lucille, a skinny, snivelling girl from the Vexin in northern Normandy.

  As Mary placed a wooden bowl of mutton stew in front of her master, she gave him a surreptitious wink, for she was more of a wife to him than Matilda. She cooked his food, washed his clothes, cleaned his house, listened to his woes – and in the past, on occasion, had even lain with him.

  When she left the hall to go through the small vestibule and around the outside passage to her cookhouse in the backyard, the only sound left was the steady champing of jaws, for Matilda’s moods never seemed to affect her appetite. John now and then attempted to start a conversation, though his wife usually only opened her mouth to complain or to deride him.

  He had almost given up trying to revive any intercourse between them, as his efforts were usually met with a snub or ridicule – or more often just stony silence. De Wolfe knew full well that she had a long-term strategy to punish him, not only for his infidelities, but for his destruction of her adoration of her brother Richard. John had, in the course of his duties as a law officer, repeatedly exposed de Revelle as a charlatan and traitor, until eventually he was ignominiously dismissed as sheriff of Devon. And now, of course, the final indignity was his depriving her of her moment of glory as wife of the coroner to the king’s court.

  Mary returned to clear away the bowls and place before each of them a thick trencher of yesterday’s bread carrying a trout grilled with almonds. When she had refilled their pewter cups from a jug of Burgundian wine and departed through the draught-screen, John made a new effort to break the oppressive silence, this time at least with some useful motive in mind.

  ‘There is talk of the yellow distemper arriving in the city,’ he began. ‘I hear that a family in Bretayne may be affected, so perhaps it might be wise if you kept clear of St Olave’s until more definite news is known.’

  Matilda’s favourite church was on the edge of Bretayne, the worst slum area of Exeter. It was so named because centuries ago the invading Saxons had pushed the Celtic British inhabitants out of the higher parts of the city down into the less desirable north-west corner of the Roman walls.

  The mention of her beloved St Olave’s forced his wife out of her sullen silence. ‘I’ll not be dissuaded from attending the House of God by some fever,’ she snapped.

  ‘It would be wiser to find some other House of God while this danger lasts,’ he said mildly. ‘Why not stick to the cathedral?’

  To his credit, it did not even cross his mind that if Matilda succumbed to the plague it would solve many of his problems.

  ‘The Lord will protect me and those who worship Him in the face of adversity,’ she said sententiously. ‘What is this ailment that people are
speaking of, anyway? We have managed to survive all the fevers and sweats over the years, as well as the gripes that turn one’s bowels to water!’

  ‘It’s the yellow distemper, woman,’ he said impatiently. ‘It was well known in former days but has not been seen for many years.’

  The topic, for once, seemed to catch Matilda’s attention. ‘What causes it, then?’ she demanded. ‘And is there any cure?’

  John picked some fine fish bones from his tongue before answering. ‘No one knows where it came from, but many suspect that it is brought in from abroad by ship-men. For it to appear inside the city is a new departure. Some blame rats for spreading it, but I can’t see why foreign rats should come within the walls of Exeter.’

  She had fallen silent again and, as John raised his wine-cup to wash down the remaining bones, he looked across at her, wondering why fate had cast them together. She was a stocky, thickset woman with a square face and a mouth like a rat-trap. In the house she wore no cover-chief, and her wiry brown hair looked like the head of a mop, in spite of Lucille’s efforts to tame it with a brush and tongs.

  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.’<
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  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.