Bernard Knight - The Witch Hunter

With this practical advice, he beckoned to Gwyn and made for the door and his horse.

When John de Wolfe went home to his wife that evening, he decided that attack was the best form of defence against what he could foresee would be a burning issue when Cecilia de Pridias next met Matilda at church. He would get his story in first and hope to moderate the inevitable tongue-lashing that would come in the next day or two.

He rode past the new Guildhall in the high street and turned right into Martin’s Lane, a narrow alley that was one of the entrances to the cathedral Close, the episcopal enclave around the great cathedral of St Peter and St Mary. Halfway down the short lane he slid from his stallion and led Odin into the farrier’s yard on the left, where the beast was stabled. Directly across the way were three almost identical houses, the one on the left being his own. It was a tall, narrow building of weathered timber, with a peaked slate roof. A heavy oak door and a shuttered window were the only breaks in its blank face.

With a muted sigh, he lifted the iron latch and stepped into the vestibule, a small room with a row of hooks for cloaks and belts hanging on the back wall. He slumped on to a bench, its only furniture, and pulled off his riding boots, groping under the seat for a pair of leather house-shoes.

As he pulled them on, there was the padding of paws from a passageway to his left, which led around the side of the house to the back yard and a large brown hound appeared. Brutus was as pleased as ever to see him and licked his hand as his great brush of a tail wagged slowly back and forth.

‘Got to face the dear woman now,’ he whispered to the old dog, as he stood up and went to the door of the hall, at the opposite end of the vestibule from the passage entrance. Brutus watched him, then decided that he preferred the back yard and vanished as de Wolfe pushed open the inner door and stepped into the main room of the dwelling.

Inside was a wooden screen to stop some of the draughts that in windy weather moaned around the sombre hall, which rose right up to the bare roof beams high above. The dark timber was partly covered by faded tapestries, except on the inner wall, which was of new stone. This was where he had had a large fireplace built with a conical chimney tapering up to roof level, a device he had seen in Brittany. Before this innovation, the smoke from a central fire-pit used to cause an eye-watering fog to fill the hall, as it sought to escape by seeping out under the eaves.

On this hot summer evening there was no fire, as their maid Mary did all the cooking in a hut in the yard. But as he trudged past the long oaken table with its stools and benches, he saw that one of the cowled chairs facing the empty fireplace was occupied. His wife was staring at the cold stacked logs as if they were crackling cheerfully on a cold winter’s night.

‘You’re late, Mary has been waiting to bring the supper in,’ she grated, without any word of greeting. John was so used to this that he took no notice and went to a side table to pour some red wine from a pitcher into a pewter cup. He saw that Matilda already had one in her hand.

‘I had to ride out to Alphington to see a corpse,’ he said with studied indifference. He brought his drink to the hearth and sat in the chair opposite his wife. Looking at her, he remembered that she had been almost comely when they married, some sixteen years earlier. Now her stocky frame had filled out and her square face had thickened, with loose skin under her eyes and throat. She was forty-four, his senior by four years, but looked a decade older. Her thin-lipped mouth was turned down at the corners in permanent disgruntlement. He admitted that his own behaviour had done nothing to make her nature more amiable, but neither of them had wanted to marry in the first place, having being pushed into it by their ambitious parents. His father, Simon de Wolfe, was a modest landowner with two manors at the coast and saw marriage into the much richer de Revelle family as a way of advancement for his second son. Matilda’s parents had hoped that a dashing young knight who was carving out a name for himself in the Irish and French wars, was a good way of getting their youngest and least attractive daughter off their hands, so the bride and groom had little say in the matter and had regretted it ever since. They had never had children, which was hardly surprising, as John had made every effort to stay away from home for most of their married life. Only in the last two years, since he had returned from Palestine and had run out of wars to fight, had they lived together for more than a few months — and although they now slept together, sleep was the operative word, for neither felt the slightest inclination to indulge in marital congress.

‘So what was this body that kept you from your supper?’

Her voice jerked him out of his reverie and he remembered his plan to forestall Cecilia de Pridias’s inevitable complaints about him.

‘Someone you knew, I’m afraid. It was Robert de Pridias, the fulling and weaving merchant. I think you know his wife quite well.’

Matilda sat up abruptly in her chair, her small eyes alert at the news.

‘Robert dead? Poor Cecilia, I saw her only yesterday at St Olave’s. How did he die? Why were you called? Was it some accident — or worse?’

‘He died of a seizure, on the back of his horse. A natural death, but sudden. It seems he had pains in his chest for some time and was under the care of an apothecary.’ He deliberately emphasised the natural aspect, to defuse the coming criticisms.

‘So why were you called?’ she snapped. Whatever her faults, no one could ever accuse the sharp-witted Matilda of any lack of perception.

John sipped his wine as he thought about the safest answer.

‘His wife — now his widow — has some strange idea that he was done to death through being cursed. Extraordinary idea, I had considerable difficulty in trying to convince her otherwise.’

‘Henry de Hocforde!’ she exclaimed, much to her husband’s astonishment.

‘What about him?’ he said feebly.

‘She has spoken to me in confidence about the trouble between the two fullers. I have the ear of many influential folk in this city, John.’

Matilda’s two weaknesses — apart from food and drink, which accounted for her heavy appearance — were fine clothes and social snobbery. As sister to the King’s sheriff and wife to the King’s coroner, she considered herself amongst the elite of the county hierarchy. It galled her to find that John had not the slightest interest in social advancement and she had to prod him mercilessly to take part in prestigious events in the city. The de Pridias family were rich merchants, Robert having been master of his guild, so his wife had been someone worth cultivating.

‘Cecilia told me that de Hocforde had been putting pressure on her husband to sell his mill. It seems that the affair was becoming quite oppressive and that Robert’s health was suffering from it.’

This was quite different to the widow’s claim that he was ‘hale and hearty’, thought John. Aloud he said, ‘But that’s a long way from murder by witchcraft, which she accused de Hocforde of perpetrating!’

He meant this to sound jocular, but Matilda’s granite face showed no amusement. ‘Never mock what you do not understand!’ she snapped sententiously.

This surprised him, as Matilda was pathologically religious, spending half her waking hours at either the nearby cathedral or in St Olave’s Church in Fore Street. Indeed, very recently, after he had offended her even more than usual, she had taken herself to Polsloe Priory, intending to take the veil — until she found that the poor food and dowdy raiment was not to her liking. For her now not to dismiss outright any un-Christian practices like witchcraft, seemed at variance with her faith — though on reflection he decided that after many centuries of acceptance, magic was so deeply ingrained in most people’s minds that a veneer of religious belief was not sufficient to extinguish it.