Bernard Knight - A Plague of Heretics

Though the courtyard had been empty, the sound of their arrival brought boys out of the stables to take their horses. The old steward hurried out to greet them and shepherded John and Gwyn into the house. There was a large central hall, with two pairs of rooms divided off from it on either side and an upper solar built out over a porch at the front. John ordered Gwyn to stay in the hall, as he did not wish to increase the risk of him catching the contagion in the sickroom and taking it back to his family.

In one of the side rooms he found William lying on a low bed and attended solicitously by his mother and sister, with the steward’s large wife and a younger servant hovering anxiously in the background. The Lord of Stoke appeared to be asleep, his mouth open and his eyes shut, but his breathing was laboured and a sheen of sweat lay on his forehead and face, in spite of the coldness of the room. His face was yellow, as were the hands that lay across his chest. On a table near the bed were bowls of boiled water, flasks of liniment and cloths to lay on the patient’s fevered brow and body. A large bunch of herbs was stuck into a jug, and in the firepit at one side of the room fragrant smoke curled up from where other dried herbs had been sprinkled on the logs. These attempts at treatment suggested desperate frustration that was echoed in the haggard faces of Evelyn and Enyd. They came to embrace him, Evelyn with tears seeping from her eyes.

‘He is no worse today, though no better,’ whispered his mother. ‘All we can do is pray for him.’

They all sank to their knees in the clean rushes that covered the floor, hands clasped and heads bowed. John initially felt he was being false, as he had little real faith in pleading for his brother’s recovery when children were lying dead in the village from the same ailment. But as he raised his head and saw his brother’s face as he strained to cling to life, a wave of love and pity flowed over him, and he fervently asked for God’s mercy on a man who had come from the same womb as himself.

After few moments Enyd rose and took John’s arm to lead him back into the hall, where Gwyn was waiting with the reeve.

‘You men must be tired and hungry after your journey,’ she said firmly.

The steward marshalled a couple of young serving girls to bring food and drink from the outside kitchen, and soon they were sitting eating at a table near the firepit.

‘We feel so helpless to do anything either for William or the others in the village,’ said a distraught Evelyn. ‘There is no physician anywhere nor even an apothecary nearer than Brixham.’

‘I doubt it would help much if there were,’ said John cynically. ‘I have a new doctor living next door to me and he flatly refuses to attend any victims, saying there is nothing he can do for them.’

The steward, hovering behind them with a jug of cider, said that he had heard that morning that new cases were being spoken of in Brixham and Dartmouth, further down the coast.

‘All at ports and harbours,’ muttered Gwyn. ‘It must be coming in from abroad, surely?’

‘I seems like it, but how would it have reached Stoke?’ growled John.

‘We have tradesmen in every day,’ answered Evelyn. ‘They bring in fish from Teignmouth — and we had a chapman through here last week. God knows where he’d been before coming here.’

John could hear the suppressed panic in everyone’s voice, which was also beginning to appear in Exeter. This was an invisible foe, stalking the streets and fields with a stealth that could not be detected. If disease came from a rabid dog, then it could be slain, but this yellow plague could be neither seen, heard nor smelled, which made it doubly terrifying.

They went back and sat alongside William’s pallet for a time, watching helplessly as he lay inert, only his rapid breathing showing that he was still alive. From time to time the steward’s wife moved forward and gently wiped his face with a cloth dipped in warm scented water.

‘Has he been awake at all today?’ asked John.

‘He mumbled and muttered some hours ago, but has not spoken rationally to us since last evening. He has passed no water since then, which worries me. The last lot was almost green.’

‘Has he drunk anything?’

‘We tipped a little watered ale between his lips, but he has swallowed very little,’ replied Enyd.

John recalled from his fighting days that wounded men sometimes died of thirst as much as their injuries and, desperate to find some advice to contribute, suggested that they tried harder to get some fluid into his brother.

‘I’ll try to get that bloody doctor to come down here with me,’ he grunted. ‘And if that fails, then at least a good apothecary.’

At noon they sat down to dinner in the hall; though the food was ample and well cooked, no one had much of an appetite — not even Gwyn, whose capacity for his victuals was legendary. Afterwards, they sat again with William, who had hardly moved on his mattress, until John’s mother decided that there was no point in his staying too late.

‘Get you back to Exeter, my son. There’s nothing you can do here. I know you will have duties there to carry out.’

‘I’ll be back tomorrow, later in the day, and will stay until next morning,’ he promised. ‘If you need me more urgently before then, send Alfred and I’ll come, even if it be in the middle of the night!’

As they were climbing into their saddles in the bailey, with the family and servants gathered around, his mother asked him if he was going to call upon Hilda on the way home. Enyd was very fond of the handsome blonde from Dawlish — if there had not been the social gap between the daughter of a Saxon reeve and a knight’s son, she would have welcomed her as a daughter-in-law. But her husband wanted John married off into an aristocratic Norman family and had pushed him into wedlock with Matilda de Revelle. Enyd had done her best to accept Matilda, but in return John’s wife had never concealed her disdain for his mother, mainly because of her Cornish and Welsh parentage.

John considered her question as he arranged his cloak over the back of his saddle. ‘I think not, Mother. I would never forgive myself if I took contagion to her, just for the sake of seeing her face for a few minutes. Alfred says Holcombe is free of it — it would be better if she went to stay there with her parents, rather than keep to Dawlish, with its ships and ship-men coming and going.’

This time, it was only Gwyn and his master who trotted off through the stricken village. John hoped that he would not see Alfred coming again to Exeter, as it would probably mean that he brought news of William’s death.

As they rode, Gwyn told him of what he had learned the previous evening from his tour of the taverns. ‘I found a couple of men who knew some heretics,’ he said. ‘They seem to think that there is no law against it, as no one gets punished.’

‘Did you get to speak to any yourself?’ called John as they rode almost saddle to saddle along the coast road.

His officer shook his bushy head. ‘No, those sort are not likely to be great frequenters of alehouses. But I know they meet in various places to discuss their beliefs.’

He said that one group used an old derelict barn off the Crediton road, not far from the village of Ide, which the potman at the Bush had mentioned.

‘Who are these people, I wonder?’ queried de Wolfe. ‘We know our corpse was a woodworker and, if Thomas was right about the other, he was just a labourer.’

‘One fellow said that several he knew were foreigners, probably French,’ replied Gwyn. ‘Maybe they were from the Languedoc; that seems to be a breeding place for these folk.’

They passed through Dawlish, and once again John had to resist the temptation to call on Hilda, though this time the fear of bringing contamination, however small the risk, made it easier for him to pass by. They reached Exeter as dusk was falling, and Gwyn went off to the Bush to see his wife and check his latest batch of ale-mash. John carried on to Martin’s Lane to hand back his hired horse, but when he emerged from the stables he did not go straight across to his own front door. Instead, he went to the next house and rapped on the heavy oak with the pommel of his dagger. It was opened by a young maid, but before he could state his business Cecilia appeared behind her.