Bernard Knight - A Plague of Heretics

‘He? Who’s he?’ demanded John, almost demented with mixed rage and relief.

‘Yes, what evil bastard did this?’ bellowed Ralph Morin from behind him.

‘She says it was her husband,’ answered Mary in a voice choked with emotion. ‘And she said that Clement also strangled my mistress, may God curse him!’

An hour later some order had been made out of the chaos in Martin’s Lane. The apothecary had examined both Cecilia and her maid, who was slowly showing signs of regaining her wits. Richard Lustcote decided that neither would gain anything by being carried off to St John’s Priory and that bed rest and some soothing potions would be the best treatment.

John had sent Gwyn down to the Bush to fetch Enyd and Hilda and soon they arrived, weeping tears of relief at his sudden deliverance from the accusation of murder. His mother clutched him to her breast as if she wanted to crush him back into the womb that had borne him, while Hilda braved his black stubble to give him tender kisses of thankfulness. Once they had vented their emotion, they willingly agreed to help tend to the two victims in Cecilia’s own house.

Instead of a solar, there was a bedroom partitioned off the hall, and here the lady of the house was gently laid on her couch. Lustcote applied some soothing balm to her bruised throat and gave her a honeyed draught to ease her battered voice-box. The maid normally slept in the warm kitchen-shed, as they had no live-in cook, so after her head wound had been cleaned and bandaged she was laid there, under the watchful eyes of a benign neighbour.

John had looked at the damage to Cecilia’s neck while Richard Lustcote was anointing it and saw typical finger bruises and nail scratches on the skin.

‘Almost exactly the same as those on Matilda’s throat,’ he told Henry de Furnellis when the men were standing around the fire in his own hall next door, drinking some ale after all the commotion. A dozen neighbours and a few men-at-arms had gone off around the city streets as the hue and cry, this time looking for Clement the physician.

‘Why the scratches, as well as the blue bruises?’ asked Brother Rufus, who did not intend to miss any of this drama.

‘From fingernails,’ explained de Wolfe. ‘Usually from the victim trying to tear away the strangler’s hands.’

‘Why should her husband want to kill her, for Christ’s sake?’ demanded Henry de Furnellis. ‘And why kill Matilda, as she claimed?’

John shrugged, though he badly wanted to know the answer himself. ‘When she can speak more easily, no doubt all will be made plain. In the meantime, where is that murderous bastard?’

The sheriff for once looked optimistic, a rare mood for him. ‘We’ll get him, never fear! I’ve sent soldiers down to each of the city gates, to make sure that tonight no one goes in or out. Hopefully, not a mouse can leave the city, so he must be in here somewhere.’

Leaving the women to look after the victims, they decided to join the hunt and, after placing a man-at-arms on the door, dispersed to join the various groups who had formed the hue and cry about the town. By now, the city grapevine had alerted almost the whole population; one of these was Thomas, who hurried up just as John and Gwyn were leaving.

His peaky face was creased in smiles when Gwyn explained that their master was now free from suspicion, and he crossed himself repeatedly as he murmured a prayer of thanks for John’s deliverance.

‘We’re off to look for this damned doctor now,’ rumbled Gwyn. ‘You’re the clever one among us — where do you reckon he might be hiding?’

‘Have you tried the place where he holds his healing consultations?’ suggested Thomas. ‘I think it was in Goldsmith Street.’

They hurried to the lane near the Guildhall, but found it was one of the first places that the men of the hue and cry had thought of. Theobald, the fat constable, was still standing outside the shop when they arrived.

‘Osric told me to keep watch in case Clement came back,’ he explained.

‘Came back? So was he here before?’ snapped de Wolfe.

Theobald waved a hand at the premises behind him, which was a former cordwainer’s shop with a wooden shutter on the front which was lowered to form a display counter.

‘The door was open and there’s some disorder inside, bottles and pills scattered on the floor, but no sign of the doctor.’

Thomas had a quick look inside the single room and came out nodding. ‘Looks as if he was searching for something in great haste,’ he reported.

The coroner looked from face to face. ‘Now where do we look?’ he asked angrily. He had collected his sword from his hall and was swishing it aggressively, as if practising to lop off the head of the man who had slain his wife.

As usual, it was Thomas who had the best suggestion. ‘The physician is a very devout man, perhaps abnormally so, by all accounts,’ he observed. ‘So perhaps he has taken himself to a church to seek absolution for his many sins?’

‘Perhaps he’s also seeking sanctuary!’ said Gwyn with unconscious irony, after de Wolfe’s recent manoeuvre.

The coroner rasped a hand over his bristly cheeks as he thought of the various places Clement might have gone to.

‘Not the cathedral, it’s too obvious and too many people hanging about there. But what about St Olave’s; he is very friendly with that poxy priest, Julian Fulk.’

For want of any better idea, they set off down the High Street and across Carfoix to the little church at the top of Fore Street, founded by Gytha, the Saxon mother of King Harold. Outside, de Wolfe hesitated and beckoned to his clerk.

‘Thomas, I can’t go storming in there with a naked sword and I’m not leaving it in the street. You’re a priest. You go in and see if there’s any sign of him.’

He waited with Gwyn at the edge of the road, listening to the cries of other searchers lower down towards the West Gate. The fitful light of a gibbous moon appeared through a gap in the clouds and illuminated another group of men coming out of Milk Lane almost opposite, their tramping feet echoing in the night air.

Then their attention was jerked back to the church as Thomas’s face appeared in the doorway, looking even paler than usual, given the poor light.

‘You’d better come in, master!’ he said in a very subdued voice. ‘Sword or no sword, this is more important.’

John and his officer followed the clerk into the bare nave lit only by a pair of candles on the altar.

As Thomas led them towards the chancel step, he began intoning, ‘Domine, requiem aeternam dona eis, et lux perpetua luceat eis.’

A moment later they saw the outline of a man spreadeagled across the step, his arms outstretched as if in supplication to the cross on the altar table. De Wolfe bent and grasped the back of his hair and lifted the head to see the face.

It was Clement of Salisbury, his features contorted in a final grimace of agony, his mouth twisted into a rictus of pain. Smashed alongside him was a small pottery bottle, a trickle of dark liquid still seeping down a crack in the chancel step, just as the physician’s life had seeped away a short while earlier.

Next morning the main participants assembled again in the hall of Clement’s house. Mary had brought in pastries, ale, cider and wine from her kitchen, and they sat around the large table where some time ago John and Matilda had eaten supper with the physician and his wife.

‘How is the young maid today?’ asked the sheriff, who sat at the head of the table.

‘Recovering, thank the Blessed Virgin,’ said Enyd de Wolfe, who had appointed herself chief nurse. ‘She has regained her senses but has a severe headache and her face is sore from that bruise. The apothecary, bless him, has given her a strong draught to let her sleep today.’