The Malice of Unnatural Death: (2 page)

When I try to think what actually led to a story’s forming in my mind, it is often remarkably easy. Usually the court records
or coroners’ rolls lead me to a basic plot, and then the format of the story, the characters, and sometimes the location,
can be conjured up.

This story was a little different. I had been hunting about for some little while for a decent concept for book 22 in the
series, because I felt very satisfied with its predecessor,
The Death Ship of Dartmouth.
That book seemed to me to have a strong story, with some excellent action and fresh characters, and I wanted something as
strong – but different.

My problem was that the next important piece of history would not be until early 1325, which was some months after the last
story. I needed something to fill in the gap. By sheer good fortune, as so often happens, a strange little snippet led me
straight to a new plot and the book.

I happened to read in Alison Weir’s book
Isabella, Queen of England, She-Wolf of France
a paragraph in which she mentioned a curious assassination attempt. The Despenser was alarmed in late 1324 and early 1325
to learn that Lord Mortimer was paying a necromancer to try to murder him with magic. This, apparently, put the fear of God
into him,
and he even went so far as to write to the Pope to apply for special protection – to which the pontiff somewhat testily responded
that if the man would confess his sins, behave better and stop making enemies, he’d find he felt more at ease with himself. I paraphrase, but the letter’s meaning was clear.

It put me in mind of a short paper produced by that marvellous historian, H.P.R. Finberg, called
The Tragi-Comedy of Abbot Bonus
, in
West Country Historical Studies
(David & Charles, 1969), which described the dispute between John de Courtenay and Robert Busse, two monks who contested
the abbacy of Tavistock in 1325. In that case, Courtenay complained about Busse’s election to the top job for a number of
reasons, but one was that he had been visiting a necromancer in Exeter to make sure that he won the post.

That was enough to give me my starting-point. I began to look up necromancers in other books, and soon gained a lot of useful
material, especially from Norman Cohn’s brilliant study
Europe’s Inner Demons
, published by Heinemann Educational and Sussex University. From that I learned much about how magicians would conjure spirits. However, it was a visit to the library and a quick look at the Selden Society books, Volume 74:
Select Cases in the Court of the King’s Bench part IV
, that fleshed out the story of the Despenser murder attempt.

The case was exactly as set out in my story here, so I won’t perform the tedious act of repetition. Suffice it to say that John of Nottingham never, to my knowledge, escaped from Coventry and Warwick, and I have taken the unforgivable step of suggesting
that poor Sheriff Sir Simon Croyser was guilty of trying to free a felon in order to fulfil his ambition of killing the king. Oddly enough, though, other aspects of the story are correct, such as the mysterious illness and
subsequent death of Sir Richard de Sowe. His death would appear to have been enough to make Despenser tremble.

As well it might.

From my point of view, only one thing was important here, though, and that was the fact that there was a story begging to
be told. I just had to sit down and let the characters tell it their own way.

The subplot of the poor servant girl is one that has been in my mind for quite a while now. I first came across the sad story
of Jen when I was reading Elliot O’Donnell’s
A Casebook of Ghosts
many years ago.

This fascinating book is the record of a ghosthunter, or purports to be. He came from a long line of illustrious Irishmen,
and asserted, I seem to recall, that being the seventh son of a mother who was herself the seventh in her brood he was more
than usually prey to ghostly visits. Whether or not this was so, it is certainly true that he was a keen researcher of strange
phenomena, and an avid collector of stories from eye-witnesses.

Many of the stories are pleasantly gruesome, as one would hope. However, the story of the young maidservant was peculiarly
sad.

He told (so I remember) of a young servant who became infatuated with a guest at the country house in which she worked. All
too often in those days, visitors would come to spend a significant time with the family: you need only read Wodehouse to
get a feel for the relaxed atmosphere of such places. The young visitor, so O’Donnell wrote, was probably entirely unaware
of the effect he had on the young, malleable heart of the servant girl. Without doubt, he was moderately courteous to her,
as a public school educated
young man would have been to the servants in his host’s house, but that was almost certainly all there was to it.

But she convinced herself over a matter of weeks that he was utterly enraptured by her. She began to dream of the day that
he would leave, how he would take her away from the drudgery of her miserable working life, and elope with her. They would
marry in splendour, honeymoon in Europe, and return to a small house of their own, where they would raise their little family. All this was in her mind.

And when he left? He thanked her, along with all the other staff, and gave her as he gave all of them, a small gratuity. A
coin.

She, apparently, was appalled, and stood rooted to the spot, staring at the coin, but then, as the coach door shut behind
him and the horses were whipped up, she was heard to shriek. The coach moved off, and she launched herself after it, to the
surprise of the others standing by to wave off the young gentleman. No one had any idea of the fixation she had with the man,
and to see her fling herself down the driveway after the carriage must have had a terrifying impact. In those days, madness
was viewed with horror.

So the upshot of the story was that the girl spent the whole of the rest of her life bemoaning the fact of his departure,
predicting his imminent return, and keening to herself in the local lunatic asylum. And in all that time, she never once let
his coin leave her hand. Such asylums in those days were not pleasant, and it is sad to consider this poor young woman walking
amongst the insane, between those who stood screaming in shackles and the others who lay in their own mess, with no possibility
of a cure. It would be many centuries before anyone began to think of psychotherapy.

It
was said (which is why Elliot O’Donnell heard of it) that when she died she still had that coin in her hand, and an unscrupulous
pair of gravediggers saw it and tugged it from her clenched, dead fist. But they were then hounded by her wraith, which sought
her coin all over the asylum and in their homes, and made their lives a misery. The two returned it to her grave at the earliest
opportunity, and the ghastly visitations ceased.

I can treat the story slightly flippantly now, but when I was eleven years old, reading that while listening to Neil Young’s
After the Goldrush
, it had a significant impact on my impressionable little mind. Neil Young’s voice and tracks from that album still have a
nostalgic effect upon me.

The story may or may not be true, but I do believe that young girls, young women, call them what you will, can occasionally
form these intense bonds with the
concept
of a man or a future. This is something which I have never seen in a male of a similar age. Perhaps it’s a gender thing.

So the idea of a young girl who formed an entirely mistaken view of how a social superior regarded her was something that
stayed with me for a long while – and I am glad to have exorcised it at last!

I should also apologise to certain other people in this story.

Not only have I unfairly slandered Sir Simon Croyser, who, for all I know, was a perfectly honourable man who served his king
with diligence (although from the sheriff’s records, that would make him unique), but I have taken liberties with the movements
of Sir Maurice Berkeley. He was most certainly on the run at this stage, although whether he ever approached Exeter is pure
speculation on
my part. The fact that he had a sister and she was married to Sir Matthew de Crowethorne, however, is not speculation. That
is the purest fiction!

Finally, by way of an acknowledgement, I should mention the marvellous Jonny Crockett and his team at Survival School in Devon. Without Jonny and his lads, I would never have learned the pleasures of camping without a tent at minus four degrees, of shelter-building,
fire-making, and, of course, pulling two pigeons inside out with my bare hands.

Sadly I missed the delights of toasted woodlice, but no doubt that experience is yet to come.

If you would like to experience a genuine survival experience, you can contact Jonny at
www.survivalschool.co.uk.
I can highly recommend them.

And that is enough on how this story came together. As usual I am enormously indebted to my agent, Jane Conway-Gordon, and
all those at Headline who helped make this book reach the shelves, and as always any errors are entirely my responsibility
– unless they were caused by faulty typesetting, poor editing, over-zealous copy-editing, inefficient proof-checking or other
failures by other people.

Michael Jecks

Northern Dartmoor

May 2006

Friday before the Feast of the Holy Cross in the seventeenth year of the reign of King Edward II
¹

At the root of that murder there was no jealousy or hatred. If anything, it was murder in the interest of science. A new weapon
must be shown to be effective before it can be used with confidence. That was why Sir Richard de Sowe died: to prove that
they
could
kill him.

In choosing him, the necromancer had selected a local man whose health it would be easy to ascertain. Sir Richard was a secular
knight in the pay of the king, but he had not harmed John of Nottingham. No,
his
death was due to his proximity.

Not that Robert le Mareschal cared about that. No, as he stood in the dark room, the seven little figures illuminated by the
flickering flames of the cheap tallow candles all about them, he didn’t even think about the man whose death they were planning. He felt only the thrill of the journey: the journey of
knowledge.

It
had always gripped him. There was nothing like learning for firing his blood. He had early heard about the use of demons and
spirits to achieve enlightenment, and that was why he was here now, to learn how to conjure them, and have them do his bidding.

The room was warm, with the charcoal brazier glowing brightly in the corner, but for all that, he suddenly felt a chill.

It was as he was holding the figure of de Sowe that it happened. He was thrilled with the experiment and aware of little else,
but as his master told him to take the lead pin there was a sudden icy chill in the room. It almost made him drop the doll,
but fortunately he didn’t. John was a daunting man, tall, thin, with cadaverous cheeks and glittering small eyes that looked
quite malevolent in the candlelight, and Robert had no wish to appear incompetent in front of him.

‘Thrust it into his head,’ John said in that quiet, hissing voice of his.

Robert le Mareschal held the pin in his hand and stared at the figure. Glancing at John, for the first time he realised what
he was about to do: kill a man. Until that moment his thoughts had been on the power of magic, but now he was faced with the
truth. The pin was a three-inch length of soft lead. No danger to anyone, that. Press it against a man’s breast and the lead
would deform and bend.

‘I showed you what to do. Warm it in the candle, then thrust it into his head.’

The necromancer was wearing a simple black tunic with the hood thrown back, and Robert could see the lines about his neck. In this light, his ancient flesh was like that of a plucked chicken, and Robert felt repelled. But the
penetrating eyes were fixed upon him, and the gash of his mouth above his beard was uncompromising.

Robert warmed the pin and then, as quickly as he could, he pressed it into the head of the wax model.

When he had been young and attempted something dangerous for the first time, Robert had found that his heart began pounding
and his throat seemed to contract; then, as soon as the trial was over, he returned to his usual humour.