The Tainted Relic (8 page)

‘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?’

The coroner looked up at Edwin. ‘How many were sleeping here last night?’

‘We only had three besides him,’ quavered the old man. ‘Apart from that drunken sot in the corner.’

De Wolfe loped across the loft and shook the man awake, but could get no sense out of him, as he was still totally befuddled.

‘Who were the other three?’ he demanded, frustrated at the lack of witnesses. Edwin shrugged and Nesta answered from where she stood on the ladder, halfway into the loft.

‘They were travellers, who went on their way soon after dawn. They took pallets in the first row just here, so can’t have noticed this man lying dead over there in the darkness.’

‘Somebody must have come up here to kill him, so maybe it was them,’ reasoned Gwyn.

Nesta shrugged her shapely shoulders. ‘We were even busier than usual late last night. People come and go all the time. I can’t watch every move they make.’

‘He doesn’t look as if he had anything worth being robbed for,’ objected Gwyn, prodding the corpse with his foot.

‘His scrip looks empty, but you’d better make sure,’ ordered de Wolfe, indicating the frayed leather purse on the man’s belt.

Gwyn pulled it off and squeezed it, feeling nothing inside. He opened the flap and upended it over his palm. ‘That’s odd!’ he boomed. ‘Let’s have that light a bit nearer, Edwin.’

As they stooped over the lantern, they could see small flecks glistening in its light.

‘Shreds of gold leaf, just like we found on that fellow robbed at Clyst St Mary! Bloody strange, that!’ observed Gwyn.

De Wolfe rubbed at his stubble thoughtfully, but could make no sense of the coincidence. He decided to leave his inquest until the afternoon, giving Gwyn time to round up as many of the previous night’s patrons as he could find, to form a jury. Meanwhile, they adjourned down to the taproom for some ale and food, while they discussed the matter. As soon as Nesta’s maids had scurried in with bread, cold meat and cheese, and Edwin had brought brimming pots of the best brew, they sat around a table and tried to make sense of this violent death. Thomas seemed very pensive as he sat picking at his breakfast.

‘I’ve been thinking about what the other dead man said before he passed away,’ he offered timidly.

Though Gwyn was playfully scornful of the little clerk, John de Wolfe had learned to respect the ex-priest’s learning and intelligence.

‘What’s going through that devious mind of yours, Thomas?’ he asked encouragingly.

‘This gold leaf–that must surely link them, it’s not a common thing to find in poor men’s pouches. And gold leaf is usually applied to valuable or sacred objects.’

‘How’s that connected with whatever that robbed fellow said in Clyst?’ asked the sharp-witted Nesta.

‘It comes back to me now–the old man in Clyst said the victim had uttered the words “Barzak” and “Glastonbury”.’

‘If he was walking northward through that village, he may well have been making for Glastonbury, so what’s the mystery?’ grunted Gwyn.

‘It’s the oldest abbey in England–Joseph of Arimathaea and perhaps even the Lord Jesus himself may have visited there,’ said Thomas, crossing himself devoutly. ‘But it’s the other word he uttered that intrigues me–Barzak!’

‘What the hell’s a barzak?’ growled the big Cornishman, determined to deflate his little friend.

‘Not what, but who?’ retorted Thomas. ‘I recollect the legend now, it’s been told around our abbeys and cathedrals for many years. It’s a curse, which again the old man in Clyst mentioned.’

Nesta, Edwin and even Gwyn were now intrigued, but de Wolfe was his usual impatient self.

‘Well, get on with it, Thomas! What are you trying to say?’

‘The Templars brought this story back long ago, of a tainted relic from the Holy City.’ He crossed himself yet again. ‘It seems that a fragment of the True Cross was cursed by a custodian called Barzak and anyone handling it died a violent death as soon as it left his possession. The relic has been virtually hidden away somewhere in France for many years–I seem to have heard it was in Fontrevault, where old King Henry’s buried. It was useless as an attraction for pilgrims, as they learned to shun it.’

The coroner pondered this for a moment, as he supped the last of his ale. ‘So why should this thing turn up in Devon?’ he asked dubiously.

Thomas shrugged his humped shoulder. ‘Perhaps the man in Clyst had brought it from France–he could have been coming from the port of Topsham, if he was on his way to Glastonbury.’

‘Sounds bloody far fetched to me!’ mumbled Gwyn through a mouthful of bread and cheese.

De Wolfe stood up and brushed crumbs from his long grey tunic.

‘It’s all we’ve got to go on so far. Thomas, you’re the one with the religious connections, so go around and see if you can find any rumours about a relic. And you, Gwyn, round up as many men who were drinking in here last night as you can and get them down here before vesper bell this afternoon. I’ll go and tell our dear sheriff we’ve had a murder in the city.’

The coroner’s brother-in-law, Sir Richard de Revelle, was busy with his chief clerk in his chamber in the keep of Rougemont when John arrived. He sat at a table, poring over parchments that listed tax collections, ready for the following week’s visit to the Exchequer at Winchester. More concerned with money than justice, the sheriff was supremely uninterested in the death of a lodger in an alehouse, until he heard that the man was a priest. At this news, de Revelle sat back and stared at de Wolfe.

‘A priest? Staying in that common tavern, run by that Welsh whore?’

John resisted the temptation to punch him on the nose, as he had suffered this particular provocation many times before.

‘My officer and clerk are about the town now, trying to find out more about him,’ he replied stonily. ‘There may be a connection with the murder of a chapman yesterday–probably by outlaws.’

De Revelle was more concerned about the man being a cleric, not out of any particular concern for the welfare of priests, but because he was a political ally of Bishop Henry Marshal in their covert campaign to put Prince John on the throne in place of Richard the Lionheart. De Revelle was always on the lookout for any opportunity to further ingratiate himself with the prelate, so he felt it might be worth stirring himself to catch the killer, if it raised his stock with the bishop. He demanded to know the details of the crime and John explained the circumstances of both deaths, but held back Thomas’s suggestion about the cursed relic.

Richard leant back in his chair and stroked his neatly pointed beard thoughtfully. He was a small, dapper man, with a foxy face. Fond of showy garments, today he wore a bright green tunic with yellow embroidery around neck and hem, with a cloak of fine brown wool trimmed with squirrel fur thrown over his shoulders against the chill of the cold, dank chamber.

‘A gang of outlaws could hardly have cut the man’s throat in the upstairs of a city alehouse–even though that Bush is a den of iniquity!’ he sneered, determined to taunt his sister’s husband with reminders of his infidelity. ‘Far more likely that your doxy turned a blind eye to some local robber who preys on her guests.’

Once again, John refused to rise to the bait and suggested that a squad of soldiers should be sent to clear the outlaws from the woods around Clyst St Mary. De Revelle dismissed this idea with a wave of his beringed hand.

‘A waste of time! Every bit of forest in Devon is crawling with these outcasts. Trying to find them is like looking for a needle in a haystack. But I want to catch the killer of this priest, for the bishop will be on my neck as soon as he hears about it.’

John decided to keep Thomas’s doubts about the genuineness of the priest to himself for the moment, else Richard’s interest would rapidly evaporate. With a muttered promise to keep the sheriff up to date with progress, he left his brother-in-law to continue his embezzlement of funds from the county’s finances and went back to his own bleak office in the gatehouse.

With both his assistants out on the streets, de Wolfe felt obliged to occupy himself and reluctantly turned back to his reading lessons, slowly tracing the Latin script with a forefinger and mumbling the words under his breath. An east wind whistled through the open window slits and he huddled deeper into his cloak as the morning wore on. In spite of the discomfort, which he had learned to endure after twenty years’ campaigning in a range of climates from Scotland to Palestine, he eventually fell asleep from the sheer boredom of his lessons, and jerked himself awake only several hours later when Thomas de Peyne limped up the stairs and pushed through the sacking over the doorway.

‘I’ve found who he was, master–and where he came from!’ squeaked the little ex-priest excitedly, proud of himself for being able to be of help to this grim man to whom he owed so much for giving him a job after his disgrace. John, still half asleep, glared bleary eyed at his clerk. ‘Tell me about it,’ he grunted.

‘I went first to the cathedral and made enquiries among the vicars and secondaries, but no one had any news of such a priest. Then I went down to St John’s Priory on the river, but again they had seen no one like that. I tried a couple of the city churches with no result, then ventured into Bretayne to call at St Nicholas Priory.’