The Elixir of Death (26 page)

Bristling with indignation, the Scotsman threw his crucible down on to the bench. 'At least I made mine here and now - and I can do it again under your very nose!' he snapped angrily. 'So let me see you make another of those knobs of gold, then perhaps I will be better impressed!'

Nizam stared at him for a long moment, then his eyelids slowly came down. 'Tomorrow. Not today. Today I must rest.'

He rose from the stool, moved in front of the hearth and lay down, curled up like a dog. His two henchmen crept forward until one was at his head, the other at his feet. Within a minute, he appeared to be sound asleep.

That evening, more than a mile away in the little village of Bigbury, a dozen freemen and villeins congregated as usual in the alehouse. It was a mean place, just a wattle-and-daub cottage of one room, with a lean-to shed built on to the back as a sleeping place for the ale-wife and a separate hut behind, where she brewed her indifferent ale. Only the ragged thorn bush, whose stem was jammed under the eaves of the thatch over the front door, indicated that it was a tavern.

Apart from the church, it was the sole focus of social life in Bigbury, and after dark, the men who had a spare halfpenny to pay their weekly toll for ale came to sit or stand about the fire-pit. Here they could gossip away an hour or two before going home to their straw palliasse or heap of ferns, to sleep the sleep of exhaustion until the daily grind began again at dawn.

As in most villages in feudal England, where the inhabitants were rarely able to stray more than a few miles from home, very little happened to enliven their conversation. Most of the talk was about murrain in the sheep or the probable father of the latest babe of the miller's daughter.

Tonight, however, there was something new to gossip about, a topic that gave rise to some apprehension and furtive looks over shoulders. The atmosphere of superstitious unease was heightened by a thunderstorm, which had threatened all day and now crashed and rolled in the clouds that covered the moon. Occasional flashes of lightning could be seen through the ill-fitting door and the gaps in the ragged thatch overhead.

'I saw them as plain as that big wart on your nose!' declared the sexton, who looked after the tithe barn, as well as the church and its burial yard.

The man with the wart glowered at the unkind remark. 'You'll poison your spleen and your guts if you drink so much - especially this ox-piss!' He held up his misshapen clay pot, slopping the turbid brown fluid over the edge.

The ale-wife, a blowsy widow who had scraped a living selling poor ale ever since her husband was hanged for poaching a hind, threw the core of a withered apple at him, catching him on the side of the head. 'Mind your words, Alfred Smith! Or go find your ale elsewhere, not that there's any as good as mine hereabouts.'

'No, Madge, nor none worse!' retorted the smith amiably. 'But our brave sexton must have been full of someone's ale when he saw three ghosts!'

Another villager, a stocky youngster, a conductor who led one of the eight ox-plough teams, chipped in with a knowing nod of his head.

'There's strange goings-on in that part of the forest. I keep well clear of it myself. It's all down to that old ruin that's in there somewhere. I went in as a child and saw such weird sights as made me shun it ever since.' He said this in a sepulchral voice that was accompanied by a loud peal of thunder.

'Last night, you say this was?' demanded Madge of the sexton. 'You didn't have much to drink then, as you said you had the runs from some rotten pork your wife served you for dinner.'

'That I did. I thought my very bowels were on fire! That's why I was squatting on the edge of the wood on the way back home.'

'We don't want to hear about your guts, Sexton,' grunted the ploughman. 'What about these spirits or whatever you saw?'

'I had my arse towards the track, so I was looking into the wood. I was there for God knows how long, as I was straining fit to burst. Then in the moonlight, I saw three figures gliding through the trees, dressed in long white robes. One behind the other, not a sound from any of them.'

Alfred the smith should have been christened Thomas, as he was always doubting. 'How could you see them in the dark of the forest?'

'Because the bloody moon was up, that's why!' snapped the sexton. 'It was clear last night, before this storm came. I was on the edge of the woods, so I had enough light to glimpse these ghouls that were haunting the trees.'

He held out his pot to the widow and she trudged to the back of the room to dip it in a cask of new ale and bring it back to him.

'Here you are, you old liar!'

'I tell you I saw them! Fair shook me up! I hoisted my breeches and ran home, careless of whether I soiled myself or not.'

'There's strange things in that bit of forest, right enough,' said a new voice, a thin old man who had been the thatcher until a fall from a roof had crippled one leg. 'I recall a time when I was a boy when that old castle in the middle was pulled down by old King Henry's men. They set fire to the donjon on top of that hillock and pulled down the palisade around the bailey.'

'What's strange about that?' demanded the smith. 'Soon after, there was talk of ungodly rites being performed at the old priory next to it. The parson then - that's long before the one we've got now - had to go in and throw holy water about and chant prayers to drive out the Devil.'

The sexton nodded his agreement. 'I heard that from my father. And who among us here is willing to go deep into the forest alone or at night? No bugger will, that's for sure!'

'That's because of the bloody outlaws and thieving vagabonds that are camped out in there,' snapped the smith. 'Look at what's happened these past few weeks! Chickens and sheep stolen, even a goat from up towards St Anne's. I even heard that winter turnips and cabbage had been taken from a garden of one of the agisters who lives on the north edge of the forest.'

The old man nodded sagely. 'The charcoal burners that used to go in there for coppiced wood say they're now too scared of the ruffians that threaten them. I don't know what the world's coming to!'

'Why couldn't these ghosts of yours be three of these outlaws, bent on a night's poaching?' asked the smith of the beleaguered sexton.

'Did you ever see outlaws in long white robes, like shrouds?' he retorted.

'What did they have on their heads, then?' asked Madge.

The sexton scratched his head through his sparse ginger hair, as he tried to remember. 'Not hats, that's for sure. Just trailing things, hanging down their backs. Never seen the like before - nor want to again!' Another peal of thunder and a brilliant flash gave emphasis to his words.

'Should we tell somebody about this?' asked the ploughman, with a concerned look on his round face. 'Maybe Roger Everard?'
 

Everard was the bailiff from Aveton Giffard, the larger village at the head of the Avon estuary, a few miles upstream from Bigbury.

The smith was contemptuous. 'Tell him what? That our drunken sexton, while having a shite in the forest, saw three ghosts dressed in white gowns! He'd have us up at the manor leet and get us fined for wasting his time.'

'Well, there's something odd going on in that forest,' mumbled the sexton obstinately. 'I know what I saw and it wasn't natural. We never used to have this trouble, things getting stolen and spectres wandering about the outskirts of our village. I reckon it's a sign!'

'Sign of what, you silly old fool?' sneered the smith. 'The end of the world?'

'Don't mock, Alfred!' snapped the ale-wife, who was also a pillar of the Church, as the priest was one of her best customers at the back door.

'The Apocalypse is not far off, according to what the parson said last Sunday.'

As if supporting her words, a shattering clap of thunder exploded overhead, with a simultaneous sheet of lightning that even in the gloomy taproom momentarily turned them all as white as the sexton's ghosts. Seconds later, torrential rain hammered down, bouncing under the ill-fitting door and spraying through the tattered thatch above. Thoughts of spectres in the forest were temporarily forgotten in their concern over getting to their homes along the waterlogged tracks in the cloudburst that would soak their thin garments - but when they all lay on their damp pallets later that night, images of unquiet spirits and terrifying ghouls in the nearby forest marched through their simple minds before sleep overtook them.

'But you can't stay here, John, it's not seemly!'

Nesta's eyes were round with concern, as she sat up straight on the wide mattress. Suddenly aware of her nakedness, she clutched the rumpled sheepskin coverlet to her rounded bosoms, heedless of the fact that her equally rounded bottom was exposed lower down the bed.

John de Wolfe, lying on one elbow alongside her, glowered defiantly at his mistress.

'Why not? I've stayed here many a night before. Almost all last week, in fact.'

'That's different, John!' she exclaimed with a certain lack of logic. 'You weren't staying permanently then. What will people think?'

'The same as they think now, that you are my mistress. What's new in that?'

The Welsh woman floundered for an answer. 'It just doesn't seem right,' she said weakly. 'You're a knight and a law officer and I'm just a tavern keeper.'

'As we both were yesterday - and last week and last year, dear woman! Everyone from Dorchester to Plymouth knows that we are lovers.'

She flopped down on to the feather mattress and buried her face against his shoulder.

'Have you really left her, John?' she said in muffled tones.

The coroner slipped an arm around her shoulders and stared at the inside of the roof, where twisted hazel withies across the rafters supported the new thatch outside.

'Yes, cariad, I've left her,' he said in the language they always used together. 'Matilda said she wished not to set eyes on me again and I replied in kind. This is but the inevitable outcome of what's been building up for months, if not years.'

'But you've both said such things - and far worse - many times before. It always blows over, John.'

'So you don't want me either, Nesta!' He made it a statement, not a question. In answer, she nipped the skin of his chest with her teeth, then kissed it softly. 'Don't be silly, John. But this is really serious. How can you possibly live here, the King's Coroner?'

'It's an inn, isn't it?' he growled with mock ferocity. 'I'm entitled to a bed in a tavern, just as the King's Justices sleep in the New Inn when they come to Exeter for the court sessions. I'll even pay you my penny a night, if it makes you feel easier.'

This time she pinched his thigh with her fingernails. 'Everyone is entitled to sleep in an inn, but not in the landlady's own bed!'

'Right, then, I'll just pay for a bag of straw in the loft outside.'

She sighed and rolled over on to her back to join him in staring at the roof. 'Be serious, John, for pity's sake! What about your house and Mary and your old hound!'

'They will carry on just the same. Matilda is so fond of her stomach that Mary will be needed to keep it filled. And Brutus can sleep in her cook shed, just as he does now. I can call to see them every day.'

'How will I ever get any work done, with you under my feet?' she objected, though her objections were being weakened by his endless stock of excuses.

'I'll be at my duties every day and I promise to sit quietly in the taproom every evening. I'll be no trouble, I promise you, except when I get you in here at night!'

He made a grab for her and they rolled together on the soft goose-down bed. Later, as he slept and snored, Nesta lay awake to wonder how long this fancy of his would last.

The following day, John called at his house and found that, as he had expected, Matilda was still with her cousin in Fore Street. She often did this when they had had a bigger quarrel than usual, battening herself on her unfortunate relative for a few days until she pined for Mary's better cooking and the obsequious attentions of Lucille. He collected his few spare clothes from the chest in the solar and got the old man who chopped firewood and cleaned the privy to take them down to the Bush.

Mary took his news in much the same manner as Nesta.

'You can't leave home and live in an alehouse!' she snapped scornfully. 'You're the county coroner, they don't do things like that.'

John felt hounded, now with three women telling him how he should behave. This was supposed to be a male-dominated society, he thought. Norman knights and barons should have ladies who obeyed their every wish, on pain of chastisement. They were the sex that should be decorative and pliable, playthings of the solar, locked up in chastity belts when their lord went off to battle. Some chance! he thought ruefully. If Hilda took the same line, it would be four to one voting against his inclinations.

'I tell you, Mary, I'm leaving!' he shouted in exasperation. 'She's gone too far this time. We can't stand the sight of each other, so why prolong this charade of living together?'

'Because you are married, Sir Coroner,' said the maid calmly, using the faintly sarcastic title she reserved for when she was annoyed with him. 'You stood with her in that cathedral around the corner and the Church joined you with a bond that no one except God can put asunder. And he's not likely to come to your aid, I'll warrant!'