The Witch Hunter (26 page)

John saw the lad gaping at the mass of bags and loose silver, more money that he was ever likely to see again for the rest of his life. On impulse, de Wolfe bent and grabbed a handful of coins, which he stuffed quickly into the boy’s pouch.

‘You’re out of a job now, so this will tide you over.’ He glared at the two constables. ‘You didn’t see that, understand? Now put the lock back on the chest and keep your mouths shut, both of you.’

He marched back to the ladder and climbed down, calling up orders to Osric. ‘Send someone up to Rougemont and get the guards to take the corpse up there. I’ll hold the inquest tomorrow.’

There was no way in which he could cram it into the storeroom of the priory, both because it would be indecent to lodge it with a female body – and because the prior, a miserable man at the best of times, had already grumbled about the frequency with which his premises were being used as a dead-house.

‘We’ll have another corpse to house very soon,’ said Osric, as they set off for Fore Street. ‘It’s been a busy day!’

As Thomas was absent, the coroner was glad to see a familiar figure coming towards them as they turned into Northgate Street, garbed in a black Benedictine robe. It was Brother Rufus, the rotund priest from Rougemont who acted as the garrison chaplain at the chapel of St Mary in the inner ward. He was an amiable if garrulous fellow, who seemed to have a fascination for the investigation of crime and who had several times latched on to de Wolfe’s inquiries, to the annoyance of Thomas, who was very jealous of his own position.

‘Just the man I need,’ shouted the coroner. ‘One who can write for me on a parchment roll!’

He explained his lack of a clerk to record the events of the evening and the priest was more than happy to oblige. As they had to go past St Olave’s on the way, Rufus went in and persuaded Julian Fulk to loan him a quill, ink bottle and a sheet of parchment. The chaplain was agog to know what was happening, and John gave him a summary as they hurried on down to the next scene of death. He was glad to hear that the chaplain was strongly against this persecution of witches and had condemned Gilbert de Bosco’s obsessive campaign.

‘I used to be a village priest in Somerset, before I became chaplain at Bristol,’ he explained. ‘I soon learned there that these women – and a few men – were invaluable in such places, far from apothecaries or monkish infirmaries.’ He puffed a little as he tried to keep up with the coroner’s long strides. ‘It’s true that sometimes they got up to no good, with a little sorcery against other village folk – but it was all in the mind of the victims. If they knew that a “hex” had been put upon them, they persuaded themselves that they were bewitched – all the rest was mere mummery!’

His lecture was cut off as they reached the house, where Osric stood gesticulating outside. He had gone ahead when Brother Rufus had stopped off to get writing materials and was now pushing back a small crowd of sightseers from around the door. The house was on a narrow plot, its single room built of stone, with a high-peaked roof of wooden shingles. There was a bare yard of beaten earth at the back, reached by a narrow gap between the house and the next-door building. Here a wooden lean-to shed provided the kitchen and the usual privy and pigsty lined the back fence. The coroner pushed his way past the onlookers, some of whom were shoving at Osric and making threatening noises.

‘Good riddance to another bloody witch!’ shouted one man, who promptly got a buffet on the head from another, who yelled back, ‘What evil did Elias Trempole ever do you? He healed up the ulcers on my legs and charged me nothing!’

A scuffle broke out, with abuse and counter-charges from both men and women in the crowd, which was rapidly attracting more people from the surrounding streets. John cursed himself for not wearing his sword, though he rarely needed to carry it within the city. Instead, he grabbed Osric’s badge of office, a wooden staff with a metal band at the top, and began laying into those in the crowd who seemed to be the worst troublemakers. With a series of smacks and prods, he roared at them to be silent, and such was the power of his dominating appearance that they all subsided into a glowering, muttering but more docile mood.

At this point, the other constable, who John now remembered was called Theobald, came running up and Osric commanded him to keep everyone out of the plot, while he accompanied the coroner and Brother Rufus around the side of the house to the yard.

Here they repeated the routine they had followed in Waterbeer Street, as the body of the more elderly Elias Trempole had an identical wound in the same place on his head and no other injuries. The castle chaplain poked about in the other sheds in the yard, then sat on the seat of the earth closet in the privy with his piece of parchment spread on the blade of a wooden shovel placed across his lap. As John prepared to dictate what Rufus should write as the coroner’s record, he admired the monk’s adaptability, though he recalled that Rufus had acted as a priest in several French campaigns and had learned to be as flexible as the soldiers to whom he administered.

‘You had best first set down the facts about Walter Winstone,’ he suggested to his new scribe and proceeded to give a quick summary of the apothecary’s death. Then he described the sparse findings concerning the alleged wizard of Fore Street, as he stood stooped over the man’s corpse.

‘Had you better have a look inside, Crowner?’ suggested the chaplain, cocking his head towards the back of the house, from which came wailing and weeping. He gathered up his writing materials and followed de Wolfe through the door in the lean-to addition at the back of the building. Inside, it was more of an alchemist’s den than a kitchen, with a clutter of flasks, pots and pestles and mortars on several benches and a haphazard collection of plant and animal remains hanging from the shelves and rafters. Bundles of herbs and strange dried plants competed for space with mummified reptiles and strips of fur and leather.

‘Best keep those troublesome folk outside from seeing this collection,’ grunted de Wolfe. ‘It’ll only make them more convinced than ever that someone else was in the habit of raising Satan in his kitchen.’

‘Especially if they see these,’ added Rufus, drawing John’s attention to something on one of the littered tables. He pointed to two small straw figures, which John recognised as being almost identical to the one found under the saddle of Robert de Pridias. They had no cloth or hair attached, but near by were a couple of crude metal spikes similar to the one he had seen in Alphington. Like many in the city, the chaplain knew all the details of de Pridias’s death, as his widow had proclaimed them loudly around the town.

The coroner’s brow furrowed as he tried to assemble the significance of today’s events in his mind. Two identical murders, but no apparent connection between the victims other than a tenuous thread concerning witchcraft. What could an apothecary have in common with a fulling-mill worker, other than Elias’s reputation as a male witch and Walter’s support of a mad canon’s crusade?

Shrugging off the puzzle for the moment, John followed the sounds of distress in the next room and pushed his way through a leather flap that shielded the doorway between the kitchen and the hall of the little house. Here he found the widow of Elias, a large woman whose ample bottom flowed over the sides of a milking-stool, being comforted by a daughter and a neighbour, both of whom were wailing almost as loudly as she. This was a scene that John hated, as any form of emotion embarrassed him and drove him into an even more gruff mode of speech. Luckily, the big monk had no such problem and his sympathetic spirit burgeoned as he went forward to soothe and comfort the women, using his best pastoral manner to calm them down.

He spoke to them in his avuncular way for a few moments, then came back to John and beckoned him out into the kitchen-cum-sorcerer’s den.

‘They know little of any significance, Crowner,’ he announced, unsuccessfully trying to conceal his delight at being involved in a murder investigation. ‘The wife came home from visiting a relative to discover Elias dead in the yard, just as we found him. Nothing seems to have been stolen, though there seems little of any value here, unlike the apothecary’s dwelling.’

‘Does she or the daughter know of anyone who might be his enemy?’

The monk shrugged his ample shoulders. ‘They admit he was never loath to sell a charm or a curse to those who wanted them and may well have upset those who thought they were the target of his necromancy. But they know of no one in particular who may have taken umbrage sufficient to want his death.’

Osric had sidled up to hear this part of the conversation, having left his colleague Theobald outside to keep out the sullen crowd still clustered round the gate. ‘Remember, Crowner, that he worked at the fulling mills on Exe Island,’ he said quietly. ‘His master was Henry de Hocforde.’

As de Wolfe digested this, he caught the eye of Rufus, whose eyebrows rose on his moon face. ‘There seem to be threads connecting each other like a spider’s web, Sir John,’ he observed. ‘He was the merchant that Cecilia de Pridias accused of wishing for her husband’s death.’

The coroner ran his fingers through his long black hair in a gesture of exasperation. ‘But why would he want this wizard dead now, so long after the deed was done? And anyway, we sane people know that the fellow died of a seizure. Straw dollies are just a bloody nonsense and an irrelevance. And what in God’s name could that miserable little pill-pusher have to do with it?’

Brother Rufus shrugged. ‘You said that he was treating de Pridias for an ailment in his belly, but that tells us nothing.’ He blew out his breath like a tired horse to express his frustration. ‘All I do know is that the witch-hunting canon has caused a great deal of trouble, including a few deaths. I pray that God will forgive him when the day of judgement comes.’

In the late August dusk, an elderly woman picked her way slowly through a maze of muddy paths on Exe Island, outside the western walls of the city. The river flowed swiftly a few yards further on, its water swollen by the rains on Exmoor, though it had not yet flooded over the wide marshy area above the uncompleted bridge. Avelina Sprot, the dairy wife from Milk Street, lifted the hem of her brown woollen kirtle to keep it out of the mire, though her wooden clogs were caked in the tenacious clay that lay between the patches of coarse grass that dotted the flats. Muttering under her breath at the foul place that she needed to visit, she threaded through the reens and leats of the marsh, aiming for a rickety hut that stood on its own, out near the main river bank. Although there were many other shanties and shacks dotted across the island, housing the poorer labourers and wool porters that served the mills further upstream, the one she was seeking was even more ramshackle.

When she eventually slithered up to it, she saw that the occupant needed all the magic she could muster to prevent the hut from falling into the river, as it leaned at a precarious angle, its rotting boards and mouldering thatch needing but a good push to tip it over.

The householder was obviously at home, as smoke was filtering from under the eaves, as well as from many holes in the walls, and the battered hurdle that served as a door was lying on the littered ground outside. She called out to attract attention.

‘Lucy! Are you there, Lucy?’

For a few moments there was no response, then an apparition shuffled to the doorway and peered out, the eyes blinking behind inflamed lids as she strained to see who was calling her.

‘It’s Avelina, Lucy. Avelina Sprot. I must talk to you.’

Even though she had known Lucy for years, the visitor had not seen her for some months and was sad to see how she had deteriorated lately. Lucy was of indeterminate age, but looked at least a hundred, thought Avelina. Her thin grey hair was matted and filthy and her back was so bent that she had to stretch her neck up to look ahead. But her most remarkable feature was the growth of long grey hair over most of her face and neck, leaving only the skin around her eyes and forehead visible. She wore a grubby and shapeless black garment which hung from her gaunt frame like a curtain, and she shuffled along with the aid of a knobbly stick. Her eyes were filmed with cataracts and she had to come close to peer at her visitor to make sure of her identity.

‘Avelina Sprot! What brings you here, sister?’ Compared with the rest of her decrepit appearance, her voice was unexpectedly strong. She was not claiming her as a sibling, but part of the loose sisterhood of cunning women.

‘Have you not heard of what is happening in the city and around it?’ asked Avelina. ‘We are being persecuted, with one already dead and two more condemned.’

Bearded Lucy, by virtue of both her age and reputation, was considered by those who possessed the gift as being their unofficial leader, much as the apothecaries looked to Richard Lustcote as their figurehead.

Lucy beckoned for Avelina to come inside, but the visitor shook her head. She had seen Lucy’s dwelling once before and was in no hurry to repeat the experience. ‘I’ve no time, I must get back for the skimming. But I wanted to warn you and to ask if there is anything that can be done to stop this madness. Half the city is out for our blood, even though in a month’s time they will regret it.’

Bearded Lucy sank slowly on to an empty box that lay among the debris outside her hut and leaned forward, clasping her gnarled hands on her stick. ‘I have heard some of this, but I get out very little now. Kind folk bring me something to eat now and then. I hope to die soon,’ she added simply.

‘Nonsense, you can’t die yet, we have too much need of you,’ snapped Avelina. She proceeded to tell Lucy all that had been happening in the last week or so and the old woman listened in silence.

‘You say that the witch-hunter is this priest, this canon?’

‘Yes, Gilbert de Bosco. But he was put up to it by the widow of this merchant and an apothecary, Walter Winstone, who was jealous of our healing skills.’

Lucy screwed up her red-rimmed eyes and sat in silence for a moment.