Bernard Knight - The Witch Hunter

There was a flash which lit up the bars of the shutters on the window and, a short moment later, a loud clap of thunder.

‘At least this will cool the air — though the farmers and peasants will not welcome yet more rain on the harvest,’ observed the archdeacon.

‘So where is de Bosco now? It’s too much to hope that they locked him up until he’s banished to a mean chapel on Bodmin Moor or somewhere equally dismal.’

John de Alençon shook his head, the pink skin of his sunburned tonsure glistening in the candlelight.

‘They took him home and called the infirmarian to attend to his carbuncle and to cool his mania with a sedating draught. We look after our own, John, even if they have fallen by the wayside.’

As another peal of thunder shook the house, the archdeacon’s steward tapped on the door and put his head around it. ‘Pardon, sirs, but there’s someone who wishes to speak urgently with you. It’s Peter de Bologne, the vicar to Canon de Bosco.’

He stood aside and the young priest who had appeared at the inquest hurried in, rain dripping from his dark hair and shoulders. ‘Archdeacon, please, can you come? My master is behaving in a most strange manner. I fear for his safety.’

The two Johns rose and went to the door, which opened on to Canons’ Row. The huge towers of the cathedral rose in front of them, the dark bulk of the building black against the last of the western twilight. It was sheeting with rain, which fell almost vertically, with little wind to deviate it.

‘This way, he’s at the end of the Close. He’ll catch his death in this, given his state of health.’

The vicar hurried anxiously away, looking back to see whether they followed. The archdeacon looked at the coroner and shrugged. ‘Not much choice, have we?’

His steward tried to offer him a cloak, but he waved it away. ‘Better that only my cassock is soaked, rather than that as well. Come on, John.’

They both set off in the gloom, trotting through the downpour after the younger cleric. A hundred paces away, they passed de Bosco’s house, but the vicar kept going until he reached the foot of the city wall at the end of the Close. The fortification, which stretched all around Exeter, was about twenty feet high here, with a walkway along the top, reached by stairs built into the masonry at intervals.

At the foot of the nearest, the vicar stopped and pointed upward. ‘He went up there — I fear he must be confused in his mind, with the fever from the infection in those awful boils.’

The rain eased a little; it had seemed impossible that it could continue with such intensity for long. De Wolfe shook the water from his beetling eyebrows and began to climb the slippery steps. At the top, he looked right and left, then gazed down, to where the two priests were following him.

‘To the right, Crowner,’ called the vicar. ‘I saw him go towards the South Gate’

The wall here was a long uninterrupted stretch that overlooked Southernhay, the gardens and fields immediately outside the city on that side. It ended against the large bulk of one of the towers of the South Gate, which housed the burgesses’s gaol.

It was now virtually dark, thanks to the massive clouds that had rolled in from the sea, but occasional breaks fleetingly allowed moonlight to strike through. During one of these John saw a figure, almost invisible in black, standing still about two hundred paces away.

Then the light vanished, but a second later a flash of lightning lit up the whole scene and confirmed that it was Gilbert de Bosco, his arms upraised to the heavens.

‘It’s not safe,’ wailed the vicar, who now also stood on the wall, with de Alençon behind him on the top of the stairway. ‘He could fall, especially in his condition!’

‘Maybe that’s what he intends!’ said the archdeacon, gravely.

Suddenly, the clouds parted again and full moonlight fell on them. They saw that Gilbert had his face upturned, as well as his arms. He reminded de Wolfe of a church wall painting he had once seen, of some Old Testament prophet communing with God on a mountain in Sinai.

‘We must get to him before he falls or jumps!’ he snapped, starting to step along the walkway, which had low castellations on the outer side. It was narrow, dark and wet, so he moved carefully. The light brightened slightly as a wisp of cloud moved away, and he looked up. The orb above was an almost perfect circle — it was the night of the full moon.

‘De Bosco, keep still, man. I’m coming to get you,’ he yelled. Behind him, the archdeacon called out that he was following and John turned momentarily towards him. That probably saved his life and certainly his eyesight, as an explosion like the end of the world erupted near by, with a flash that would have seared his eyeballs if he had been looking ahead. A blast of air hurled him to the stones and only a crenellation on the outer side of the wall stopped him from being pitched over into Southernhay.

There was a sulphurous smell as the rain miraculously stopped and an eerie silence enveloped them.

‘Oh, good Christ, he’s gone,’ cried the vicar tremulously, pointing along the wall, where now nothing could be seen except a wreath of smoke ascending from a patch of fused sandstone where de Bosco had been standing.

John, shaken but unharmed, ran along the wall and looked down. There was nothing on the outer side but on a patch of waste ground at the foot of the wall on the city side, he saw an inert body.

They ran back to the steps, hammered down it and then along to where the canon lay. The coroner pushed the others aside and looked at Gilbert. His clothing had been rent into strip-like rags, singed and smoking and there was a fern-like pattern of pink lines across the skin of his exposed chest and belly, typical of other lightning strikes he had seen abroad.

The man’s mouth and eyes were wide open, as if he were staring and shrieking at the full moon above. John looked up at the wall from which he had been thrown and saw smoke still wisping up from the stones. Maybe it was the shock of almost being struck himself, but just as he had imagined when the roof of the Bush fell in he thought that, just for a split second, the smoke formed itself in the moonlight into an image of a bearded face.