Bernard Knight - A Plague of Heretics

‘Have they confessed?’ asked Gwyn.

‘No, have they hell! They deny everything, though they were seen running away from the woman’s house.’

‘Any stolen goods on them?’

Sanguin shook his head. ‘She had nothing to steal. A young widow, living on the parish, so they beat her and ravished her for spite, the swine!’

‘Will she die?’ asked John.

‘Best ask the nuns at the priory; they are caring for her. But the poor woman is beaten badly.’

John scratched his head as an aid to thought. Where victims were badly injured, they could be given into the care of the assailant, who would usually do all he could to keep them alive, for if they died within a year and a day of the assault, he would be tried for murder. However, a couple of rascally sailors were unlikely to be of much use to the poor woman, compared with the care she was getting at the nunnery, which was well known for its expertise in dealing with childbirth and women’s ailments.

‘Get them sent into the city. They can be housed at the South Gate gaol. The sheriff can decide what to do about them, depending on whether the woman lives or dies. I’d better go down to the priory to make enquiries.’

He and Gwyn went to the woman’s cottage on the way, a desperately poor place, where he was told that the woman eked out an existence after her husband died of poisoning of the blood caught from an injury in the fields with a hayfork that stabbed his foot. The single room was so barely furnished that it was hard to tell if an assault had taken place there, apart from the bloodstains on the pile of rags that was her bed.

‘Better keep those to show at the court, if it ever gets that far,’ said John to the serjeant. ‘Now I’ll go to see the woman — or at least talk to the nuns about her.’

The nunnery was in a compound behind a stone wall, with a gatehouse guarded by a porter. John knew the place well, not only from visits concerning his wife, but from several cases concerning women, where Dame Madge, a formidable nun who acted as the sub-prioress, had been of great help to him in matters of rape and abortion.

Leaving Gwyn at the gatehouse with the horses, he sought out Dame Madge and she came to the steps of the main range of buildings to meet him.

‘The woman is too ill to talk to you, Sir John,’ she announced firmly. A tall, stooped woman with a gaunt face, she was almost a female version of John himself, a humourless, no-nonsense person who spoke her mind and whose honesty was beyond question. He did not even attempt to persuade her to let him see the victim, but accepted her word.

‘Has she been ravished?’ he asked.

‘Undoubtedly and repeatedly,’ replied the grim-featured nun. ‘She has been damaged in her woman’s parts, as well as beaten sorely about the head and face. Her wits are disordered at the moment, but no doubt they will return.’

‘She will recover, then?’

Dame Madge nodded. ‘She is young and strong and her body will heal up. I am not so sure about her mind, after such an ordeal from those swine.’

‘They will pay for it, never fear, lady. I will see to it myself He sighed and shook his head at the amount of evil in the world.

Though sequestered in a priory, the nuns were always avid for news of the outside world, and he told the old sister of the evil calamity in the city two nights earlier. She crossed herself and murmured a prayer for the dead children and their mother.

‘There are sinful people about, Sir John. Though I cannot condone heresy, which eats at the fabric of our Mother Church, no one can approve of such random and vicious cruelty.’

‘It seems to have affected my wife very much,’ said John. ‘Though she was very active in a campaign to rid the city of these heretics, since these deaths she seems to have turned in on herself and has become silent and morose.’

Dame Madge gave him a sudden sweet smile. ‘Your wife is a strange woman, Crowner! We have had ample opportunity here to get to know her, from her two fruitless attempts to take the veil. I think she despairs of life, since her brother fell from grace — and you have not helped at all, sir, with your absences and your amorous adventures!’

De Wolfe nodded sadly. ‘We should never have married, sister. It was not of our doing — we were pushed together by our parents.’

The dame nodded but was unforgiving. ‘What the Lord has joined together, let no man break asunder, even until death itself.’

With this uncompromising finale, de Wolfe left the priory, with an assurance that the nuns would let him know when the woman was fit enough to be questioned. He rode back to the East Gate in silence, Gwyn knowing him well enough not to intrude on his bleak mood. At Rougemont, they returned the horses they had borrowed from the castle stables, and John went to bring the sheriff up to date on events. When he had told him of the latest crime in Polsloe and of the failure to make any headway with the Milk Lane fire, he went back to Martin’s Lane and waited for his dinner. Matilda was up in her solar at the back of the house, so John went to sit in Mary’s kitchen-hut in the yard, drinking ale and watching her gut some fish that she was going to spit-roast over the fire that burned red in its pit in the middle of the floor. She was a brisk, competent woman, and John was always impressed by the variety of good food that she managed to produce with such primitive facilities.

As she worked, he told her of the morning’s visit to Polsloe, and as usual she was angrily sympathetic to the victim’s plight.

‘You men are such evil creatures!’ she complained. ‘Look at the harm that has been done to women and children in the space of a few days. You treat animals better than that!’

Few would let a maid speak to them so frankly, but John and Mary understood each other far beyond the usual relationship of master to servant. He cocked his head upwards towards the solar stairs.

‘What mood is your mistress in today?’ he asked. ‘She seems oddly subdued since yesterday, hardly bothering to abuse me!’

Mary nodded as she slid long skewers through the herrings to place across the forked supports over the fire. ‘There’s something bothering her, that’s for sure. But her tongue is recovering, for I heard her shouting at Lucille not long ago.’

The wraith-like French maid lived in abject subjection to Matilda’s bad temper. Recently, when her mistress had gone into retreat in the priory, Lucille had been farmed out to Eleanor de Revelle, but when John’s wife had returned to the house she was reclaimed, as if she was some piece of furniture.

John sat drinking for a while, watching the cook adding herbs to an iron pot of hare stew at the edge of the fire and peeling onions to go with the fish. Suddenly, she looked up.

‘I hear the solar door opening. You had better make yourself scarce,’ she warned.

John took the hint, as Matilda frowned upon his fraternising with the lower classes — especially as she had a shrewd suspicion that in the past John had known Mary a little too well, in the biblical sense. Taking his jug of ale, he slid out of the hut, which faced away from the solar, and hurried around the house, through the covered passage that led to the vestibule.

When she lumbered into the hall, her husband was sitting by the fire, fondling his hound’s ears. She looked at him suspiciously but said nothing as she made her way to her usual seat, the hooded monks’ chair on the other side of the hearth.

From long practice, John was sensitive to her moods and detected that her recent preoccupied depression was now giving way to suppressed anger. She glared across at him as he sat with his ale-pot in his hand.

‘Are you not going to get me something to drink?’ she snapped, her small eyes dark and penetrating.