The Medieval Murderers - The Tainted Relic

As he left the room, the prior seemed sorry enough for this penurious priest to repeat his offer of hospitality, and Gervase was taken by the young probationer for a plain but hearty meal in the small refectory. Here he tucked into a bowl of mutton stew, followed by a thick trencher of stale bread bearing a slab of fat bacon and two fried eggs, all washed down with a quart of common ale. After foraging and often going hungry in the forest, this was the first decent meal he had enjoyed in a couple of years, and he uttered not a word until he had finished. Then he spoke to the young lad, who had watched in awe as Gervase wolfed down the food.

‘What other religious houses are there in these parts?’ he asked.

The novitiate shrugged. ‘Apart from the cathedral, nothing that is likely to afford such an expensive relic. There’s Polsloe Priory just north of the city, but they have only have a handful of nuns. On the road to Topsham is St James’ Priory, but again there’s but a few brothers there. Your best chance would be at somewhere like Buckfast Abbey, but you must already have been there, as it’s on the road from Plymouth.’

Gervase nodded vaguely, not wanting to reveal that he had been nowhere near Plymouth or Buckfast. He knew this large abbey on the southern rim of Dartmoor by repute, and decided to try his luck there next, as it was a rich Benedictine establishment famous for its huge flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. They should easily be able to afford his price for the trophy he had for sale.

When he left St Nicholas, he walked back into the centre of Exeter and went into an alehouse on the high street. He felt suddenly weary and bemused at being among crowds of people after his years of furtive hiding in the woods. In spite of his claims of destitution, he had a purse full of pennies stolen from various places, and he sat savouring the novelty of drinking in an inn. Though it was not a common sight to see a priest in an alehouse or a brothel, it was far from unknown. Some parish priests, and even vicars and canons from the cathedral, were well known for their dissolute behaviour. Gervase was careful not to flaunt his stolen cloth and sat in a darkened corner of the large, low taproom, keeping his hat on to mark him as a pilgrim to any curious eyes. After a few quarts, he became sleepy, as the warmth and smoke from the log fire in the fire-pit in the centre of the room overcame him. When he awoke, he saw that the day was declining into dusk and, stirring himself, he enquired of the potman whether he could get a penny mattress for the night.

‘The loft is full, Father, I’m afraid. But you’ll probably get a place at the Bush in Idle Lane.’

He gave directions and, in the cold twilight, the renegade priest made his way down to the lower part of town and negotiated for a night’s lodging with the landlady of the inn there. After a couple of years of enforced celibacy, he eyed the attractive red-haired Welshwoman with covert lust, but her brisk, businesslike manner discouraged him from any lascivious overtures. He spent the rest of the evening drinking and having another good meal of boiled pork knuckle with onions, before taking himself up the ladder to the large loft. For the first time for several years, he luxuriated on a soft pile of sweet-smelling hay enclosed in a hessian bag, with a woollen blanket to cover him. Unlike in the other inn, there were few other lodgers and, oblivious to the snores of two other drunken patrons in the corner, he soon slipped into a deep sleep, from which he was never to awaken.

A couple of hours after dawn the next day, Lucy, one of the two serving maids at the Bush, climbed up the wide ladder at the back of the taproom, clutching a leather bucket of water and a birch broom. Her morning task was to clean up the loft after the overnight lodgers had left-all too often, those who had drunk too much had thrown up their ale over the floor or their pallets.

This morning, however, it was a different-coloured fluid that required scouring from the bare boards. As soon as Lucy reached the top of the ladder and started to move among the dozen rough mattresses laid out on the floor, she gave a piercing shriek that brought the landlady Nesta and her old potman Edwin running to the foot of the ladder, together with one or two patrons who had been eating an early breakfast.

‘That priest that came last night!’ wailed Lucy from the top. ‘He’s had his throat cut!’

Edwin, a veteran of the Irish wars in which he lost one eye and half a foot, stumbled up the ladder to confirm the maid’s claim, and a moment later he reappeared beside Lucy.

‘She’s right enough, mistress! I’d better go for the crowner straight away!’

Within half an hour, Sir John de Wolfe and his officer and clerk had arrived on the scene, any problem at the Bush being a great spur to their keenness to attend. Before climbing the ladder, John slipped an arm around Nesta’s slim waist and looked down anxiously at her. At twenty-eight, she was still attractive, with a trim figure and a heart-shaped face crowned with a mass of chestnut hair.

‘Are you very upset, my love?’ he murmured in the Welsh that they used together.

His mistress was made of sufficiently stern stuff not to be shocked by a dead body.

‘I’m upset for the reputation of my inn!’ she replied pertly. ‘It’s not good for business to have customers murdered in my beds.’

She had experienced an occasional death in the tavern, always the result of some drunken brawl, but to find a guest lying on his pallet with his throat cut was an unwelcome novelty.

‘Let’s see what this is about, Gwyn,’ snapped the coroner, leading the way up the ladder, at the top of which Edwin awaited them. With Gwyn close behind and Thomas de Peyne a reluctant third, he trooped across the wide floor of the loft. Apart from one remaining lodger, who had drunk so much the previous night that he was still snoring in a far corner, the high, dusty loft was empty. Two rows of crude mattresses lay on the bare boards, the farthest one in the second line occupied by the corpse. The place was poorly lit, as there was no window opening in the great expanse of thatch above them, but a little light filtered up from the eaves and through the wide opening where the ladder entered. Edwin had had the forethought to light a horn lantern, and by its feeble light de Wolfe bent to examine the dead man.

A great gash extended from under his left ear across to the right side of his neck below the jaw, exposing muscles and gristle. A welter of dark blood soaked his ragged shirt and the blanket, running down into the straw of the palliasse, and there was a patch of dried pink froth over the centre of his neck.

‘A single cut, right through his windpipe,’ observed Gwyn, with the satisfied air of a connoisseur of fatal injuries. ‘No trial cuts either-so he didn’t do it himself.’

‘Hardly likely to be a suicide, if there’s no knife here!’ sneered Thomas sarcastically, always keen to embarrass his Cornish colleague. He pointed to the crown of the dead man’s head, where bristly tufts of hair remained on the bared scalp, together with some small scratches. ‘That’s a strange-looking tonsure, master. Freshly made with a very poor knife.’

John had to agree with him, but saw no particular significance in it.

‘Let’s have a look at the rest of him, then.’

They went through their familiar routine of pulling up the rest of the clothing and examining the chest, belly and limbs, but apart from the massive throat wound there was nothing to find.

‘His clothing is poor, even for a priest,’ grunted Gwyn. ‘The shirt is little better than a rag and his shoes are worn through.’

‘The cassock is a disgrace, too!’ complained Thomas. ‘I wonder if he really is a priest?’