A Plague of Heretics (5 page)

Hugh shrugged. ‘Perhaps he’s seen the error of his ways at last. I even considered offering to carry some of his cargoes across the Channel in our ships.’

‘His money is as good as anyone’s, I suppose,’ conceded John. ‘I’ll leave it to you, as long as you watch the bastard like a hawk!’

John de Wolfe went out into the cold wind and the crowded streets, this time walking to Carfoix near where Thomas had had his hair cut and seen his heretic. The coroner marched across and down the slope of Fore Street, past the tiny church of St Olave’s, where his wife worshipped almost every day. Then he turned left into even narrower lanes and came out into Smythen Street, where his brother-in-law owned a small college which taught logic, mathematics and theology to a handful of earnest young men.

Further down, a side turning crossed some weed-filled land which had lain barren for several years since fire destroyed a row of wooden houses. Now logically known as Idle Lane, the only structure left was a stone-built tavern, the Bush. Since he had returned from the Crusade four years ago, this inn had been as much a part of John’s life as his own house. It was here that his former mistress Nesta had reigned as landlady until she left for Wales to get married. Now Gwyn’s wife Martha was in charge, as John had bought the inn and set them up to run it for him.

He ducked his head to enter the low front door, set in a whitewashed wall under a steep thatched roof. The whole of the ground floor was a single ale-room, with a large loft above where straw pallets provided lodging for anyone wishing to spend the night. The Bush was one of Exeter’s most popular inns, with a reputation for good food, excellent ale and clean mattresses. A large heap of logs glowed in the firepit near the centre of the room, the smoke finding its way out through the eaves under the edge of the thatch, which was barely above head height. The eye-watering atmosphere was compounded by the smell of cooking, sweat and spilled ale, but unlike many of the other alehouses in the city there was no stench of urine and the rushes on the floor were changed regularly.

He made his way to his usual seat, a bench at a table near the firepit, sheltered from the draughts from the door by a shoulder-high wicker hurdle. His bottom had hardly touched the bench when an old man materialised, sliding a pottery ale-jar in front of him, filled with a quart of the Bush’s finest brew.

‘God and His Blessed Son be with you, Sir John!’ bleated Edwin, the tavern’s ‘potboy’, though he was well past sixty. An old soldier, he had lost an eye and was crippled in one leg from wounds suffered in Ireland. Usually, he called the coroner ‘captain’ in deference to his military reputation, but Gwyn had told John that he had recently become very religious, probably as an insurance against hellfire as he felt his final years approaching. Now Edwin eschewed all mention of warfare and violence, mouthing pious platitudes instead, much to the ribald amusement of many of the Bush’s patrons, who for years past had been used to his barrack-room oaths and blasphemies.

‘Gwyn’s out in the yard. I’ll tell him you’re here,’ he said as he moved off with some empty mugs, his collapsed and whitened eye rolling horribly as he tried to wink at the coroner.

John settled down to enjoy his quart, nodding to acquaintances and exchanging a word with others he knew, who were seated at the few tables scattered around the room. Almost everyone in Exeter knew de Wolfe by sight. He was admired as an ex-Crusader and respected as one of the few honest officials in the county. Not a few feared him, as though he was an almost obsessional champion of justice he was not a man to cross, as he came down hard on any wrongdoing.

A moment later Martha bustled in through the back door, which led to the cook-shed, the brewing hut and the laundry, set outside in the muddy yard at the rear, which they shared with the privy, the pigsty and the chicken run. Gwyn’s wife was a large, matronly woman, brisk and efficient in spite of her bulk, which was emphasised by her voluminous dress of brown wool, covered by a tent-like linen apron. She had a broad, genial face, already lined from forty years of hard work. A fringe of iron-grey hair hung below the linen cloth that enveloped her head, but her small, dark eyes were as bright as buttons.

‘Sir John, can I get you some victuals?’ she demanded in her broad Cornish. ‘We’ve a new smoked ham – none the worse for coming from your brother-in-law’s piggery!’

John grinned up at her amiable face. ‘I’ve only just heard about his venture with hogs and sows. Let’s hope he’s better at making bacon that he was at being sheriff!’

He declined the offer of a meal, saying that as it was approaching noon he would soon have to go back to Martin’s Lane, where Mary, his cook-maid, would have prepared his dinner.

As Martha moved away to greet her other patrons with her easy manner, de Wolfe was reminded of how Nesta used to do the same, both of them able to chaff and tease their customers without giving offence, but also capable of dealing firmly with those who had drunk too much and became either overfamiliar or aggressive. The thought of his former Welsh mistress made him pensive for a moment, as she so often used to share this very same bench with him, as well as the little room directly overhead in the loft, where they had spent so many tender and passionate hours.

Suddenly, Gwyn was looming over him, rubbing his spade-like hands on a cloth. ‘Sure you’ll not have a bite to eat, Crowner?’

John shook his head, then sniffed at a strong smell of ale that exuded from his officer. ‘God’s bones, man, have you been drinking the inn dry? I thought you were still up at the castle?’

The ginger giant grinned. ‘I’ve just come back down to start off a new tub of mash. Haven’t touched a drop of ale since breakfast! What you smell is the fruit of my new career – apart from being the coroner’s officer,’ he added hastily. ‘My good wife has appointed me brew-master. A job made for me in heaven!’

He explained how he was now in charge of making the ale, except when called away on coroner’s duties. ‘I’m sticking to the recipe that dear Nesta used to use. Everyone says she made the best ale in Exeter, so I see no reason to change.’

Once again, the spectre of the woman he had loved rose up, but John was nothing if not a realist. Hilda of Dawlish was equally dear to him now, and the very thought of her made him eager to throw himself on to his horse and canter off down to the coast to see her. Even the dozen miles that separated them were far too many. She refused to move to Exeter, even though he could well afford to find another house for her. Matilda was entrenched in Martin’s Lane, so he seemed doomed to pound the road to Dawlish, back and forth like the shuttle in a loom.

His reverie was broken when he realised that Gwyn was talking to him again.

‘I’ve just heard a rumour that some folks down in Bretayne have fallen sick with the yellow plague. If that’s true, then it’s getting uncomfortably close to us.’ John noticed that the low murmur of talk in the taproom had suddenly altered. There seemed to be a wave of more urgent conversation sweeping across the few dozen customers, people huddling closer to hear the news brought in by a couple of porters who had just arrived.

‘Are we keeping clear of it, if there are deaths, Crowner?’ asked Gwyn, worried about his wife and two young sons.

‘Unless there’s anything untoward about any of them,’ said John reassuringly. Though there was no written law on the matter, the vague declaration of the king’s justices in September two years ago, which had set up the office of coroner, had been refined piecemeal by the judges ever since when problems had arisen. It seemed clear that while murder, accident, suicide and sudden or suspicious deaths fell within the coroner’s purview, the majority of deaths from obvious disease or old age were excluded, as long as they occurred in the presence of the family. A few of the men in the ale-room were now rising and making for the door, with worried expressions on their faces.

‘Best get home and warn my wife and daughters,’ said one as he passed, a shoemaker whom John recognised. ‘Tell them to keep indoors until we know the truth of this tale.’

De Wolfe could well appreciate how easily panic could spread in a closed city like Exeter, where more than four thousand people were packed together inside a few acres within the walls. He downed the rest of his ale and got to his feet.

‘Perhaps that’s good advice, Gwyn,’ he said. ‘Keep your boys at home for now, until we hear whether this is just some false rumour.’

He realised that it was a rather futile gesture, given that Gwyn and his family lived in one of the most popular taverns in the city, where outsiders and strangers were coming and going all the time, possibly bringing contagion with them. Something Hugh de Relaga had said that morning came back to him.

‘Maybe I will have a word with that quack who’s come to live as my neighbour,’ he muttered as he swung his cloak about his shoulders and went out into the city streets, which suddenly seemed to have a menacing feel about them.

Meal-times had never been a very cheerful occasion in the de Wolfe household, but since John had returned from Westminster they had all the charm of a funeral. Matilda, already in a chronic state of sulky depression, had been bitterly disappointed when her husband had voluntarily given up his appointment as Coroner of the Verge. At a stroke, she had been deprived of the chance to live at court and flaunt John’s position as coroner to the Royal Household, a position granted to him personally by King Richard – though John would have considered ‘thrust upon him’ more accurate than ‘granted’. Now, as they sat in the gloomy hall which occupied almost all of the high, narrow house in Martin’s Lane, she tried to behave as if her husband did not exist. Each sat at the opposite ends of the long oaken table, concentrating on the food brought in by Mary, the dark-haired young woman who was their cook and maid of all work about the house. Matilda had her own personal handmaiden, if such a title could be used for Lucille, a skinny, snivelling girl from the Vexin in northern Normandy.

As Mary placed a wooden bowl of mutton stew in front of her master, she gave him a surreptitious wink, for she was more of a wife to him than Matilda. She cooked his food, washed his clothes, cleaned his house, listened to his woes – and in the past, on occasion, had even lain with him.

When she left the hall to go through the small vestibule and around the outside passage to her cookhouse in the backyard, the only sound left was the steady champing of jaws, for Matilda’s moods never seemed to affect her appetite. John now and then attempted to start a conversation, though his wife usually only opened her mouth to complain or to deride him.

He had almost given up trying to revive any intercourse between them, as his efforts were usually met with a snub or ridicule – or more often just stony silence. De Wolfe knew full well that she had a long-term strategy to punish him, not only for his infidelities, but for his destruction of her adoration of her brother Richard. John had, in the course of his duties as a law officer, repeatedly exposed de Revelle as a charlatan and traitor, until eventually he was ignominiously dismissed as sheriff of Devon. And now, of course, the final indignity was his depriving her of her moment of glory as wife of the coroner to the king’s court.

Mary returned to clear away the bowls and place before each of them a thick trencher of yesterday’s bread carrying a trout grilled with almonds. When she had refilled their pewter cups from a jug of Burgundian wine and departed through the draught-screen, John made a new effort to break the oppressive silence, this time at least with some useful motive in mind.

‘There is talk of the yellow distemper arriving in the city,’ he began. ‘I hear that a family in Bretayne may be affected, so perhaps it might be wise if you kept clear of St Olave’s until more definite news is known.’

Matilda’s favourite church was on the edge of Bretayne, the worst slum area of Exeter. It was so named because centuries ago the invading Saxons had pushed the Celtic British inhabitants out of the higher parts of the city down into the less desirable north-west corner of the Roman walls.

The mention of her beloved St Olave’s forced his wife out of her sullen silence. ‘I’ll not be dissuaded from attending the House of God by some fever,’ she snapped.

‘It would be wiser to find some other House of God while this danger lasts,’ he said mildly. ‘Why not stick to the cathedral?’

To his credit, it did not even cross his mind that if Matilda succumbed to the plague it would solve many of his problems.

‘The Lord will protect me and those who worship Him in the face of adversity,’ she said sententiously. ‘What is this ailment that people are speaking of, anyway? We have managed to survive all the fevers and sweats over the years, as well as the gripes that turn one’s bowels to water!’

‘It’s the yellow distemper, woman,’ he said impatiently. ‘It was well known in former days but has not been seen for many years.’

The topic, for once, seemed to catch Matilda’s attention. ‘What causes it, then?’ she demanded. ‘And is there any cure?’

John picked some fine fish bones from his tongue before answering. ‘No one knows where it came from, but many suspect that it is brought in from abroad by ship-men. For it to appear inside the city is a new departure. Some blame rats for spreading it, but I can’t see why foreign rats should come within the walls of Exeter.’

She had fallen silent again and, as John raised his wine-cup to wash down the remaining bones, he looked across at her, wondering why fate had cast them together. She was a stocky, thickset woman with a square face and a mouth like a rat-trap. In the house she wore no cover-chief, and her wiry brown hair looked like the head of a mop, in spite of Lucille’s efforts to tame it with a brush and tongs.