Bernard Knight - The Elixir of Death

'We'll have to carry him out for the inquest,' said John. 'It's not seemly to expose his wounded body to the jury in here.' It was too cold and windy to hold the formalities in the churchyard, so a couple of men carried the corpse table by its handles over to the tithe barn.

Most of the men from the village, together with a few fisherfolk from the beach, formed an audience and a jury. John and Gwyn went through the usual routine, but when the coroner came to determine 'Presentment of Englishry', Father Walter interrupted him.

'I would speak to you alone for a moment, Crowner,' he demanded in a tone that anticipated no refusal. John walked over to the doorway, where the sour-faced priest had been watching the proceedings with apparent indifference.

'From what I saw at your last inquisition here, this 'presentment' business seems aimed at distinguishing Saxons from those of mainly Norman blood?'

'It does indeed,' said de Wolfe. 'But in this case, his very name and the fact that he can read and write must indicate that he is unlikely to be a Saxon peasant.'

The florid-faced priest nodded, the bags under his slightly bloodshot eyes sagging like those of some old bloodhound. He looked around at his flock in the barn and nudged John farther towards the open air, to be out of their hearing. 'I can certainly confirm that,' he said in a low voice. 'Now that he is dead, I am not so concerned about keeping too strictly to the sanctity of the confessional. At least I can tell you his true name and something of his origins.'

The coroner waited expectantly. Any information would be welcome, rather than the void that seemed to surround these deaths.

'He would have been seventy years old at his death, calculating from what he told me some years ago. Joel's full name was Sir Joel de Valle Torta, from a noble family with estates in Normandy and Essex. He had been a Knight Templar many years earlier.'

De Wolfe uttered a low whistle of surprise. 'A Templar! Usually, once a Templar, always a Templar. How came he to be living in obscurity on a rock stuck in the sea?'

'I cannot reveal much of the detail, even after his death. But he said that his sins weighed so heavily upon him that he received a special dispensation to leave the Order to become an anchorite, cutting himself off from the world.'

'Then his sins must indeed have been unusually vile! Can you tell me what they might have been? It may have a bearing upon his murder.'

Father Waiter pondered for a moment, as if communing with some higher authority — which he may well have been doing.

'It must suffice to say that it concerned his behaviour as a soldier. He came to confession regularly and it was always the same lament — his overwhelming guilt for his own actions in warfare. He was ever penitent and sought absolution. '

The coroner instinctively felt that this was important in understanding the man's death, so he pressed the parish priest harder.

'In which campaigns would he have served? There were bloody episodes in so many, from Ireland to Jerusalem. '

Then he had a sudden thought. 'But he has been here for over twenty years, so he could not have been with us in the last attempt in the Holy Land. Acre was the place where so many men have had cause for guilty consciences over the foul deeds that took place there.'

The heavily built vicar grunted. 'All I can tell you is that the cause of his anguish was indeed in Outremer — but long ago, for he was at the Second Crusade. That's all I know — at least, that's all I can tell you.'

The way his fleshy lips clamped shut indicated that no amount of persuasion would make him say more, but John was satisfied — though still mystified.

'The Second Crusade! The link that joins all these deaths!' he murmured.

As Father Walter swung away with an air of finality, John went back to complete the short inquest. Though it displayed the usual frustrating pattern of the previous enquiries into this series of killings, he left Ringmore with much to think about and to discuss with Thomas and Gwyn.

Two days later, the trio were breaking their fast in the cheerless room above the gatehouse in Exeter's castle. The cathedral bell was tolling for Prime, just before the eighth hour of the morning, and Gwyn was finishing a pork pasty, before tackling his bread and cheese.

Thomas had not long come from his early chantry Mass and was sitting at the table, preparing a palimpsest, a second-hand sheet of parchment. After scraping off the original writing, he was sanding and chalking it, ready to write a record of the Ringmore inquest, whenever the coroner was ready to dictate. But John was in a contemplative mood as he chewed on a strip of dried salt beef, which looked like leather. At least it gave him a thirst, which he quenched at intervals from a pint pot sitting in front of him.

'Thomas, you are a man of considerable intellect. Give us the benefit of that sharp mind of yours!'

The little clerk was unsure whether his master was being complimentary or sarcastic, but decided on the former. His peaky face creased into a smile of pride.

'On what, exactly, Crowner? he asked, putting aside his parchment and rubbing his thin fingers together to rid them of the chalk dust.

'We have three dead men and one more injured, the only connection between them that I can see being the Second Crusade. Peter le Calve's father and this Templar, Joel, were actually there — and the steward of Shillingford and the injured son were part of the le Calve household. Is that just a coincidence, Thomas?'

The clerk pursed his lips in thought, but before he could reply, Gwyn interrupted.

'This damned Second Crusade — before my time. What was it all about?'

The teacher in Thomas leapt to the challenge. 'Giving such numbers to Crusades is unrealistic, really. God's war against the enemies of Christ goes on all the time — there's always fighting somewhere against the unbelievers. But yes, the ones where kings and princes get involved — or there's a major disaster — they tend to get numbered.'

'All I've ever heard is that this second one was a disaster, right enough,' grunted the Cornishman.

'Many of those who set off from the West never reached the Holy Land, as far as I remember,' said the coroner. 'Didn't they go off marauding on the way? And many more were wiped out on the journey?'

Thomas nodded energetically, his great store of knowledge bursting to be free. 'Many of the German army never even got out of Europe — they found wars to fight and cities to loot on the way.'

'What's this got to do with our killings here?' muttered Gwyn suspiciously.

'If this old Crusader, Joel, was so conscience-ridden that he sat on Burgh Island for twenty years, he must have been involved in something really bad,' observed John. 'What happened that could have been so awful? Something like Acre in the last Crusade?'

Thomas tapped his fingers excitedly on the trestle table. 'Damascus! I'll wager it was Damascus.'

The other two waited, impressed by their clerk's grasp of history, recently enlarged by his readings in the cathedral library.

'That's what caused the Crusade to collapse, the last straw in a catalogue of mistakes. Two kings answered the call to arms by Pope Eugenius and St Bernard of Clairvaux after the Mohammedans captured the city of Edessa. One was Louis of France and the other Conrad of Germany.'

'Didn't the English turn out for that one?' asked Gwyn.

'The country was too concerned with civil war then, between Stephen and Matilda. Quite a big English contingent set off from Dartmouth, but stopped for months in Portugal to kick out the Moors. That was about the only successful campaign in the whole Crusade.'

'So what's this about Damascus?' snapped de Wolfe. 'It was the final fiasco, both political and military. The two kings decided to besiege it, but their forces were so depleted and their tactics were so bad that they had to abandon the attempt after only three days. In their humiliating retreat, they inflicted terrible revenge and bloodshed on the surrounding inhabitants. I suspect that was the most likely source of the hermit's guilt.'