The Medieval Murderers - Sword of Shame

De Wolfe reached Martin’s Lane and delivered his horse to the stables opposite his house, then walked the rest of the way up to the castle. He had thought to go straight to see Roger Trudogge and negotiate some kind of exchange for Gwyn’s sword, but then decided to see if any new deaths or other mayhem had been reported in his absence. He found Thomas at work as usual on his parchments, as there was much copying to be done to provide duplicates for various courts and the royal archives. The clerk looked up as he entered and enquired after Gwyn, then went on to deliver a nugget of information from the cathedral Close.

‘You know, Crowner, that I sleep on a pallet in a passageway of the house of one of the canons. Well, early this morning, as people were stirring to go to Prime, I chanced to hear two of the canon’s vicars talking in a room nearby, that had only a curtain for a door.’

John grunted, as he was well aware that Thomas was the most inquisitive person west of Winchester and that ‘chancing to hear’ probably meant that he had had his ear pressed to the door-curtain.

‘One of them was asking the other’s advice about repeated confessions he had been hearing from a particular supplicant,’ the clerk continued. ‘Though he could not repeat the content, even to a fellow priest, he felt it was so serious that he would have to consult their canon, the archdeacon or even the bishop about whether he should break the sanctity of the confessional and divulge something to the secular authorities.’

John frowned at his clerk, puzzled as to why he was being told this, as it seemed a matter for the ecclesiastical community. Usually, such dilemmas concerned flagrant breaches of morals as well as the law, such as sexual transgressions like incest or the ravishing of women or even children.

‘But what’s this to do with the coroner, Thomas?’ he asked gruffly.

The clerk’s bright little eyes glinted as he delivered his punch-line. ‘The man they were talking about was Martin Knotte!’ he whispered conspiratorially.

The coroner hurried down through the city, his wolfskin cloak flying out behind him in the breeze like a large bat as he loped along, his dark head thrust out before him. Thomas pattered along behind him, unsure of what all this was leading to, apart from the fact that his master was going to have strong words with the chief clerk at the fulling mills.

For his part, de Wolfe turned over Thomas’s news in his mind as he pushed his way through the crowded streets to reach the West Gate. What was all this about-or was it a complete irrelevancy? Perhaps the clerk’s confession was merely about being unfaithful to his wife, but that would hardly be grounds for the vicar’s grave concern.

Could it be that Martin Knotte had learned something damning about Serlo or even Christina? Had he discovered that one of them had in fact dispatched Walter Tyrell? And did loyalty to his employer conflict with his conscience and his public duty?

‘Only one bloody way to find out!’ he growled under his breath, as he strode along. ‘Shake it out of the fat bastard!’ De Wolfe always favoured the direct approach to problems.

At the mill on the river, he went straight to the clerk’s hut, where he left Thomas outside, fearing that a witness might distract his quarry from John’s intended verbal assault. Inside, he found Martin sitting at his table with a quill in his hand, poised over a parchment. The man looked ill, his podgy face almost a waxy colour.

He jumped to his feet and courteously pulled up a stool for the coroner on the other side of his bench. As John sat down, the big sword jabbed against the wooden floor and became unhooked from his belt, not being designed for warriors who sat indoors. With a cluck of irritation, he pulled it from under his cloak and rested it against the table in front of him, before glaring at the man who had resumed his seat opposite.

‘Now then, what’s the trouble, Knotte?’ he demanded brusquely. ‘Never mind how I know, but it has come to my ears that you have information that is distressing you. Is it something that I or even the sheriff should know about, eh?’

If it had been possible for the clerk to grow any paler, he would have done so. Stutteringly, he denied any problems, but his demeanour patently gave the lie to his words. De Wolfe kept at him, rasping and demanding that he divulge anything that law officers should know about, but Martin Knotte remained adamant in his tremulous denials.

‘Those priests have broken their trust,’ he complained bitterly. ‘How else could you know of this?’

‘Ha! So there is something!’ snarled de Wolfe, triumphantly. ‘You admit it now?’

Knotte shook his head stubbornly. ‘It is a personal, private matter, Crowner. It does not concern you, and you should not persecute me like this!’

John stood up, leaning on the table and glowering down at the seated clerk. ‘Does it concern Serlo, your master?’ he shouted. ‘Or perhaps the widow Christina?’

Martin shook his head violently, ‘Why should it? It has nothing to do with them.’

‘Are you just being faithful to them?’ barked John. ‘Misplaced loyalty will not save your neck if it conceals knowledge you may have against the King’s Peace!’

Again the ashen-faced man fended off all the coroner’s efforts to prise information from him, subsiding into a stubborn denial of any knowledge of wrong-doing by his employer.

Eventually, de Wolfe lost patience and jumped to his feet to wag a stern finger at Martin. ‘Then I must go and tackle Serlo himself, to drag the truth from him. It will go badly for you if I discover that you have been concealing anything from me!’

He stalked out of the hut and swept up Thomas outside, hurrying him around the corner of the nearest mill-shed in his search for the master-fuller. If he had not left Martin in such a temper, he would have remembered to ask the man about Serlo’s whereabouts, but now he had to seek him himself. As a workman passed, bent under the weight of a large bale of raw wool, John glared at him and demanded to know where his master was to be found.

‘Try the lower mill, sir,’ replied the man. ‘I saw him there an hour ago.’ They went across the yard to another large, but ramshackle wooden building and Thomas pointed to a small shed attached to one end. ‘That looks like the hut of the other clerk. He may be in there.’

But Serlo was not there, neither was he in the fulling mill, where a score of men and boys, some of them children, were labouring at tanks and troughs of water. They were washing fleeces, some treading them rhythmically with their feet to remove the dirt and grease, throwing in handfuls of fine clay to assist the process.

Above the incessant splashing and chatter, Thomas managed to question several men, but came back to de Wolfe shaking his head. ‘He has gone again, no one knows where,’ he reported as they walked out of the watery hell that was the workplace of so many of Exeter’s citizens.

‘Damn the man, he’s never around when I want him!’ growled the coroner.

‘He’s unlikely to have fled the country now that he’ll soon own all this if he weds Widow Christina,’ observed Thomas, waving an arm around them.

‘Let’s go, then, I’ve had enough for today,’ grunted de Wolfe. Then he stopped walking and slapped his left hip, feeling an empty space. ‘Damnation, I’ve left Gwyn’s sword in the clerk’s hut. I wanted to take it back to the armourer on the way home.’

They changed direction and went the few hundred paces back to the upper mill. At the hut, John pushed at the door and found it immovable.

‘Strange, it must be jammed,’ he muttered, putting his shoulder to the door with little effect.