Bernard Knight: The Grim Reaper

The cathedral Close was never totally silent, even after midnight. There was the scrabble of a stray dog rooting in a pile of butcher’s offal and the rustle of rats in the garbage that was strewn along the muddy paths that crossed this episcopal heart of the city. The wind moaned between the two great towers that reached to the sky, where thin clouds raced across a haloed moon. Its pale light made the shadows cast by the huge building all the blacker and the flickering light of a flare stuck on a wall near Beargate did little to penetrate the gloom along the cathedral’s west front. From beyond the great doors came faint chanting: Matins, the first Office of the new day, was being celebrated in the distant quire.

A cross the precinct, from the direction of little St Martin’s church, came a new sound, the slap of leather soles on the wet soil, as a figure threaded its way through the tomb mounds and piles of earth from newly opened graves. As the walker came out of the shadows, the moonlight shone on the long black cloak and cowl of a priest. However, the devotions of the early hours were not his target, for he walked purposefully past the west front and the cloisters that lay on his left.

The pitch-soaked brand burning at Beargate threw its yellow light down on him as he strode beneath, but it failed to reveal the grim intent on the face hidden by the deep hood.

A thunderous knocking on the street door dimly penetrated Sir John de Wolfe’s consciousness and triggered a throbbing headache that told of too much wine the previous evening. He groaned and turned over, pulling the sheepskin coverlet over his ears. Angrily his wife jerked the coverings back over herself.

‘See who’s making that noise, John!’ Though she was half-asleep, Matilda’s voice held its usual belligerent rasp.

De Wolfe sighed and levered himself up against the faded tapestry nailed to the wooden wall behind the bed. The movement jarred his brain, which felt as if it was swinging around loose inside his skull. He rubbed his bleary eyes and saw the dawn light peeping through the cracks in the shutters. The knocking stopped and he heard distant voices through the slit that penetrated the wall of their solar into the main hall of the house.

‘Mary’s answered them,’ he grunted, closing his eyes again and running a hand through the long black hair that covered his aching skull. The previous evening, he had been dragged, at Matilda’s insistence, to the Spring Feast of the Guild of Cordwainers. It was part of her campaign to get him to associate more with the great and good of the city and county. An enthusiastic social climber, it galled Matilda that, as sister of the sheriff and wife of the coroner, she missed out on many of the upper-class events because her husband did all he could to avoid them. Last night, he had sat glumly at the top table in the Guildhall, doing his best to drown the idle chatter of the burgesses, barons and clergy with a considerable excess of ale, cider and Anjou wine. He had managed to totter the short distance to their house in Martin’s Lane, oblivious of the tight-lipped disapproval of his grim-faced wife, but this morning he was paying the price.

‘Get up and see who’s there, I said,’ she snapped, jerking the bedclothes even further, leaving him partly naked in the cold morning air. Gingerly, he climbed out of the low bed — a thick feather mattress set on a plinth on the floor — and stumbled to a wooden chest against the opposite wall. He sat down heavily and pulled on the long black hose he had worn the previous evening. Then he hauled his long, stooping frame up again and searched in the chest for a clean undershirt and a dark grey tunic that came just below his knees, slit at the sides for sitting a horse. He stood up and cautiously opened a shutter, then squinted at the early-morning sky. Though spring was well advanced, it was cool and, as an afterthought, de Wolfe groped in the chest again for a pair of worsted breeches, which he hauled on and tied with a drawstring around his waist.

‘Go on, then! See who it is that disturbs God-fearing folk at this hour,’ goaded Matilda.

Slipping his feet into a pair of house-shoes, John opened the door and stepped shivering on to the platform outside. The solar was built high on the back of the narrow timber house, like a large box supported on wooden piles. Steep steps went down to the backyard, where several thatched sheds housed the kitchen, wash-house and privy. Mary, their cook and housekeeper, slept on a cot in her kitchen, and Simon, the aged man who tended the fires and the night-soil, lived in the wash-house. Under the stairs to the solar, another cubicle housed Lucille, Matilda’s rabbit-toothed French maid.

When de Wolfe reached the muddy yard, he could hear voices through the narrow covered passage alongside the house, which went through to the front vestibule that lay behind a massive oak door to the street. As he bent his head to go through, his old hound Brutus came towards him, tongue lolling and tail wagging in welcome. He stooped to fondle the dog’s ears and saw that Mary, a dark-haired, handsome young woman, was coming towards him, followed by a massive figure that almost filled the narrow alley. Backing out, he waited for the maid and his henchman to join him in the yard.

‘Gwyn, I might have known it was you, trying to hammer down my front door.’

‘We’ve got a body, Crowner. A strange one, this time.’

Gwyn of Polruan was an untidy Goliath of a man with a mass of ginger hair and a large moustache of the same tint that hung down over his lantern jaw almost to his collar-bones. Bushy eyebrows and a bulbous red nose framed a pair of twinkling blue eyes. He was dressed in a faded brown worsted tunic that came only to mid-thigh, girdled by a wide leather belt that carried a sheathed dagger. His brawny legs were covered with baggy fawn breeches held to his claves by cross-gartering above ankle-length leather boots. Around his shoulders was a frayed leather cape, with a pointed hood that hung down his back. De Wolfe had rarely seen him dressed in anything else, summer or winter. A former Cornish fisherman, Gwyn had been de Wolfe’s bodyguard and companion for almost twenty years, in campaigns in Ireland, France and the Holy Land.

The coroner groaned at the news, his head still thumping like a water-hammer in a forge. ‘Don’t tell me we’ve got a long ride. I doubt I could sit a horse before noon.’ His jurisdiction covered the whole county of Devon and it could take two days’ riding to reach the more distant villages.

Gwyn grinned and shook his head, his tangled hair bouncing like a red mop. ‘You don’t need your horse, Crowner! It’s only a few hundred paces away, across the Close.’

Mary stood listening, her hands on her hips. ‘Do you want some breakfast before you go gallivanting?’ she demanded.

Before the ever-hungry Cornishman could open his mouth, de Wolfe had shaken his head. ‘If it’s that near, you can get something ready for us when we get back — say an hour.’ He jabbed a finger into his disappointed officer’s chest. ‘Go and rouse that miserable little clerk of ours while I go up and tell Madam where I’m going. She’ll give me the length of her tongue if I disappear so early without some good excuse.’

Ten minutes later, John stepped from his house into Martin’s Lane, the short, narrow alley that joined the cathedral Close to the city’s high street. As he stopped to swing his mottled wolfskin cloak about his shoulders, he looked up at the dwelling he had bought ten years ago with loot from Ireland. Tall and narrow, with a steep roof of wooden shingles, the house-front was blind apart from the door and two shuttered windows at ground level. Alongside it stood an almost identical house — the only other building in the lane, apart from the farrier’s stable and the side of an inn opposite — which was empty: the silversmith who owned it had been murdered a few months earlier.