Bernard Knight - A Plague of Heretics

‘Don’t stay too long, lad,’ he said kindly as he lifted the hessian draught-curtain. ‘I don’t want to come here in the morning and find your corpse frozen to that stool!’

Back at Martin’s Lane, he hung his cloak on a wooden peg in the small vestibule behind the front door and sat on the solitary bench to pull off his boots. Though today he had only been walking around the city, he had worn his riding boots to try to keep his feet warm. With a pair of soft house-shoes on his feet, he opened the door to the hall and went into its gloomy cavern, relieved to find that Matilda was not there, only his dog sleeping by the fire. He went across to the hearth, which was his pride and joy, being copied from a house he had seen in Dol in Brittany. Instead of the usual central firepit, with its smoke rising into the room to water the eyes and irritate the throat, he had replaced the back wall of the wooden hall with stone and had a conical chimney added, which took the fumes up through the roof.

There was a good fire of oak logs burning across the iron dogs in the hearth, and with a sigh of contentment he sank into a wooden monks’ chair, rather like an upright coffin, with a high back and side wings to divert the draughts. Giving his old hound Brutus a friendly prod with his foot so that he could drag his seat a little nearer the flames, he stretched out his long legs on to the stone slabs of the hearth.

A moment later the latch rose on the door, but he was happy to see that it was Mary rather than his wife.

‘I thought I heard you come in,’ she said, almost accusingly. ‘The mistress has gone to church. I’ll mull you some ale.’

She spoke in English, heavily accented with the local Devon dialect. Her mother was a fair Saxon, but from her own dark hair, her father was probably a stranger. No one knew who he might have been, as he only stayed for the conception.

She brought him a heavy pottery mug, filled with ale from a pitcher on a side table and thrust a red-hot poker into it, which she had left in the fire in anticipation of his return.

When the sizzling had subsided, he sipped it appreciatively.

‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Mary,’ he said sincerely. ‘If it was left to my dear wife, I’d starve and go around in rags.’

‘I’m glad to see you back from London, that’s all I know,’ she retorted. ‘I lived here alone for months, worried that you’d never come back and I’d be thrown out into the street.’

John cupped his hands around the mug to warm them. ‘I told Matilda not to go down to that damned church — it’s too near Bretayne, now that there’s been an outbreak of the sickness there. You watch out, too, my girl!’

‘And how am I going to do that, pray?’ she snorted. ‘I have to go out to market every morning to see that you are fed. In fact, I’ll have to go out again now, as the mistress wants some fancy food to give those people this evening.’

She went back to her kitchen, Brutus following her, as he decided that the possibility of some scraps outweighed the attractions of a good fire. John sat with his ale, looking around the hall, whose interior rose right up to the rafters that supported the high roof of wooden shingles. The walls, partly wooden planks and partly wattle-and-daub panels inside heavy oak frames, were hung with faded tapestries, their indistinct patterns showing biblical scenes. There was a window low down on the street wall, glassless but covered with yellowed linen inside the hinged shutters. The floor was flagstoned, a novelty insisted upon by Matilda, who considered the usual rushes strewn over beaten earth too common for her station in life.

Soon, the warmth of the fire and the quart of ale combined to send him into a peaceful sleep, where he dreamed of his boyhood down near the coast at Stoke-in-Teignhead, where his mother, sister and elder brother still lived at their manor. William, his brother, was a totally different character from John, though he looked remarkably like him. He had never been a warrior like his younger brother and was devoted to managing their two estates of Stoke and Holcombe, especially since his wife and infant had died in childbirth a few years earlier. Under the will of their long-deceased father, a quarter of the income of the manors came to John, with which he was well content.

The scenes in his mind shifted to their other demesne a few miles away at Holcombe, where he had first become enamoured with Hilda, the daughter of the manor-reeve. In the way that dreams do, the scene suddenly jumped forward a quarter of a century, and as he dozed before his hearth he found himself locked in a passionate embrace with the beautiful blonde until the clatter of the door latch jerked him back to the present. It was Mary, ushering in the large figure of Gwyn.

‘Your man is here to see you,’ she announced. ‘He’s brought you some work, by the sound of it.’

She slipped out again and his officer advanced to the hearth. John knew that Mary must have assured him that Matilda was not at home, or he would not have ventured into the house. Relations between the two were frosty in the extreme, and Matilda usually referred to Gwyn as ‘that Cornish savage’, typical of her Norman disdain of anyone who had Celtic blood — which included her husband, whose mother was half-Welsh.

‘We’ve got a murder, Crowner,’ he proclaimed with almost a gleeful air. ‘A real nasty one, too.’

John rubbed the last of the sleep from his eyes and hauled himself out of his chair. ‘Where is it? If I’m taken out of town and miss these folk coming in from next door, I’ll never hear the last of it from her.’

Gwyn shook his head, his wild auburn locks shaking like the head of a sheaf of corn. ‘Not more than a few hundred paces away! Just this side of the East Gate, in Raden Lane.’

John followed him out of the hall and shrugged on his cloak and a pair of boots, while his henchman gave him some details.

‘A pair of urchins found him, lying in weeds down a narrow alley between two houses. I went up for a quick look after Osric came down to the Bush to look for you.’ Osric was one of the two constables charged by the city council with the arduous task of trying to keep the peace in Exeter’s crowded streets. The coroner and his officer were out in the lane now and facing the biting east wind as they made for the East Gate.

‘So who is he and how did he die?’ snapped John, knowing that Gwyn was wont to make a short story into a long one.

‘I don’t know who he is, for in the state he’s in his own mother would be hard put to recognise him!’

‘So he was beaten up?’ demanded John.

‘Not that simple, Crowner!’ replied Gwyn with relish. ‘He’s had his throat cut and his tongue ripped out!’

De Wolfe’s black eyebrows rose at this. Though he had seen far more horrible mutilations in campaigns across Europe and the Levant, this was unusual in the remote lands of Devon. However, he held back more questions until they reached the scene. Raden Lane was in the most elite part of the city, on the south side of the High Street just before the road ended at the eastern gate. There were a score of large houses there, occupied mostly by rich merchants and burgesses — it was as far away from Bretayne as possible, both geographically and socially.

The two men turned into Raden Lane, where some of the houses were stone-built, set back on plots a short way from the street. Others were made of wood or cob and were flush with the edge of the narrow lane. They were close together but had slim gaps between them, and one of these, halfway up on the left, was an actual path, overgrown with winter-dead weeds. Its sides were formed by the wooden fence-stakes of the houses on either side.

‘He’s up here, Crowner,’ said Gwyn, pushing ahead of him through shrivelled dock-leaves and withered coarse grass. In spite of being a path, it no longer went anywhere, as beyond the long back gardens it had been cut off by a high fence that faced St John’s Hospital near the city wall. No doubt its isolation from lack of use had led to its being chosen as a dumping ground for a murdered corpse.