The Medieval Murderers - The Lost Prophecies

John had already told Nesta the story of the Black Book of Brân and as a strongly religious Celt herself, with a reputation for being somewhat fey in matters of magic, she was intensely interested.

‘Whether or not it helped you, it is a miraculous find,’ she said. ‘I only wish that I could read, for there must be things of great importance written there.’

‘It may be the work of the devil, not the angels!’ grunted Gwyn, himself a superstitious Celt. ‘But what use is it to us in finding a killer?’

Nesta contributed some of her usual common sense. ‘Stealing such a book means that it was a person who could read Latin. Otherwise, the thief could not even see that treasure was mentioned in one of these strange verses.’

John squeezed her closer, proud that his mistress had such a sharp mind. ‘It also means that it could not have been some rough villain sent by a more learned rascal, for as you say he would not be able to find useful documents unless he could decipher them.’

‘So are we looking for some priest?’ asked Gwyn before swilling down the rest of his ale.

‘A clerk, certainly, but not necessarily a priest. Almost no one, except a few rich barons and knights who have been to a school, have the gift of reading and writing, apart from those in holy orders.’

Ordained priests and deacons were far outnumbered by a whole range of lesser clerics, ranging from sub-deacons and lectors down to mere doorkeepers. Many clerks worked not in the Church but in the courts and commerce, as they formed the elite five per cent of the population who were literate.

‘I suppose it narrows it down,’ grumbled Gwyn. ‘But that leaves us with a few hundred clerks in the city alone – and God knows how many elsewhere in Devon!’

Nesta looked up at her lover’s stern face, the jaws darkened by black stubble, as it was some days since his last weekly shave.

‘John, how are you going to pursue this killer?’ she asked, her big hazel eyes full of concern. ‘As Gwyn says, you have so many possible culprits, but no clue as to where to start.’

De Wolfe tapped the fingers of his free hand on the edge of the rough boards of the table, his frown indicating deep thought. ‘Something the sheriff said today gives me an idea,’ he said at last. ‘If you can’t catch a rabbit by running after it, you must set a trap!’

It might be an exaggeration to say that Thomas de Peyne was ecstatic, but he was certainly blissfully content at being both back in the bosom of his beloved Church after his time in the wilderness – and with a literary problem before him. He was crouched over his desk in the cathedral library, reading by the light of a solitary candle, oblivious for once of the biting cold.

The whole Chapter House was deserted at this eighth hour of the evening, and normally the timid little clerk would have been nervous at being alone in a cavernous chamber where a man had been done to death not many hours before. But his absorption in the pages of the Black Book left no room for fear, as he avidly read through the pages of vellum which bore the strange verses.

Further discussion with Brother Rufus and Canon Jordan earlier that day had brought them to the conclusion that the book had probably been brought to Exeter in the early years following the Norman invasion of Ireland, which began in 1170.

‘We were not all honourable men in that campaign,’ the chaplain of Rougemont had boomed. ‘There was a great deal of looting by foot soldiers, mercenaries and indeed the nobles themselves. The churches, abbeys and priories were not always immune, I fear. This book may have been gathered up during the pillaging of some religious house.’

The old archivist had agreed and said that he recalled that several local knights who had returned from that campaign had donated various gifts to the cathedral, probably spurred by a guilty conscience. ‘Anything vaguely literary may well have been dumped up in the library and forgotten,’ he said ruefully.

Now Thomas was going through the mysterious book, carefully digesting each obscure quatrain and trying to make sense of the messages they must contain. There were two verses on each sheet of parchment, neatly centred on the pages. The jet-black ink looked fresh, though the brittleness of the leaves and the patina on the leather casing of the wooden covers betrayed its age.

For several hours the little priest pored over the verses, and all he managed were questions rather than answers. Who was this Brân who had written the quatrains? Where and when had he done it? And, most important, why had he felt impelled to write them?

Thomas puzzled over the references to plague and Tartarus’ hordes and catamite kings – all of which meant nothing to him.

Other questions slid unbidden into his mind. Were these actual prophecies and, if so, were they in chronological order? And what time span did they cover – a hundred years or a millennium or eternity itself? And how could any reader identify whether a disaster – for that was what they seemed to foretell – would occur in his lifetime, as opposed to in the past or future?

When he had finished reading the twenty-four quatrains through for the third time, Thomas closed the book and sat back, his eyes closed as he tried to assemble his thoughts. One thing was clear to him, even though he felt guilty about his possible duplicity.

Canon Jordan seemed adamant that this book might be an evil influence and so should be surrendered to higher episcopal or even papal authority. If that were done, the Exeter archives would lose something of possibly great religious and academic value. There and then, Thomas decided that he would make a fair copy himself, so that even if Brân’s original was taken from them, the library would at least have a record of the quatrains for further study. Surely, he told himself, even if there were some demoniac properties in the Black Book, they could not be transferred over to a mere transcript on virgin parchment. Spurred by the thought that the archivist and the bishop might act quickly and dispatch the book to Canterbury before he had time to study every verse, Thomas set to that very minute in making a copy. There was ample parchment lying around the library, as the treasury clerks and those who had to write the timetables and orders of service for the precentor kept a store in their desks. Thomas went around the room and took a couple of sheets from each place, then settled down with a fresh candle to begin his copying. He reckoned it would take him until tomorrow evening to finish the verses, given his other duties next day, then he could bind them himself. The simple materials of wood, leather and cord were kept in the library for this purpose, and Thomas was quite capable of threading a dozen pages between two thin sheets of wood and gluing leather across them. Once he had a copy, then he could concentrate on trying to decipher their meaning at his leisure, for this presented a challenge that his nimble mind relished.

Late into the night, he remained hunched over his desk, the only sounds being the scratch of a goose quill and the occasional sniff as his sharp nose became even redder in the freezing air.

It was almost midnight when he gave up, to go across to the cathedral for Matins and then back to his lodgings before the next service at dawn.

The wide-ranging duties of a coroner included many events apart from investigating sudden and violent deaths. As well as having to hold inquests on finds of treasure, any catches of ‘royal fish’ – the whale and the sturgeon – came within his jurisdiction, as they belonged to the king. But on the day following Thomas’s nocturnal labours in the library, John de Wolfe was called to yet another category of his responsibilities. Not fire or rape this time, but a serious assault. These could often prove fatal, given the lack of effective medical treatment, and sometimes coroners would commit the care of the injured victim to the assailant, the reasoning being that the latter had a powerful motive for keeping the man alive, as if he died within a year and a day the perpetrator would be hanged for murder!