The Lost Prophecies (7 page)

However, this time the victim was badly bruised and shaken but not in any serious danger of dying. De Wolfe, with Gwyn and Thomas at his side, rode out a few miles east of Exeter to the village of Clyst St Mary in answer to a plea from the manor reeve, the man responsible for organizing the labour force of the hamlet. He had ridden to Rougemont that morning to report that the bailiff had been assaulted by three men the previous evening. The bailiff was the representative of the manor lord, in this case the Bishop of Coutances, who was far away in Normandy.

‘The lad who herds the pigs raised the alarm,’ said the reeve as he rode alongside the coroner for the last half-mile into the village. ‘Simple in his wits, but he knew when something was wrong.’

‘You say this was in a field where there was a mound?’ demanded John.

‘Well, not a field as such, but in the wasteland between the pasture and the edge of the forest. There’s a grassy heap the height of a man – the old wives say it has been there since the days of Adam and Eve, though how they could know that beats me!’

‘How could your pig-boy see what happened if it was dark?’ objected Gwyn.

‘He saw the flickering lights of a lantern and crept up to have a look. The moon was more than half-full last night, so he could see a fair bit. There were three men, digging into the side of the mound, so he ran back to the bailiff’s dwelling to tell him.’

‘What happened then?’ asked de Wolfe.

‘Walter Tremble, our bailiff, called me out of my cottage and we went up there to see what was amiss. Sure enough, there were three fellows there, two of them with a pick and a shovel, digging like rabbits. Walter has a short temper and he ran ahead of me, shouting fit to burst.’

As they came within sight of Clyst St Mary, the long-winded reeve came to the climax of his story.

‘The one with the lantern straightway turned and ran, but the diggers stood their ground, and when Walter reached them they set about him with their tools. He’s a big man, the bailiff, but he had no chance against a pick and shovel wielded by two desperate men.’

‘Why didn’t you go to his aid?’ growled Gwyn.

‘I did, but I’ve got a stiff leg and was way behind Walter,’ he whined by way of excuse. ‘My breathing’s not so good either. I’m not much use in a fight. Anyway, these men after beating the bailiff to the ground ran off into the darkness after the first man. I was more concerned about getting aid for Walter than chasing them,’ he added virtuously.

‘Could you see anything of them?’ asked the coroner. ‘Were they local men, d’you think?’

‘Too dark to see, sir, even with a bit of a moon. But I got the impression that the first one, the one with the lantern, had a long habit on, down to his ankles. I thought he might have been a priest.’

‘We’ll have to ask the bailiff. He obviously got a lot nearer than you, reeve!’ growled de Wolfe sarcastically.

They had the opportunity a few minutes later as they were led to the only stone house in the village, next to the church. The parish priest had to put up with a meaner one of timber, but the absent bishop had installed his bailiff in a more substantial dwelling. In a small room off the main chamber, they found Walter Tremble groaning on a feather-filled pallet on the floor, his stout wife hovering anxiously with a hot poultice for the bruising on his chest. He looked a sorry sight, with livid purple bruising down one side of his face, puffy lids closing his right eye and numerous scratches on both arms.

However, his injuries did not prevent him from lacing his story with numerous oaths and blasphemies as he told the coroner what had happened.

‘They set upon me the moment I approached the bastards!’ he mumbled through swollen lips. ‘Struck me with a shovel and the handle of a pick before running away into the darkness, the cowardly swine!’

He could add little to what the reeve had already said, apart from claiming that the two diggers were large men, dressed in dark clothing, one with a sack around his shoulders.

‘What about the one with the lantern?’ asked Gwyn.

‘That sod was much smaller, but he ran off before I got to the mound,’ replied the bailiff. ‘He was dressed in black, a long tunic like the one your clerk is wearing.’ He nodded painfully at Thomas, whose rather threadbare cassock was slit up the sides for riding a horse.

There was no more to be learned from Walter, and with some muttered platitudes about trusting that he would soon be recovered de Wolfe took his leave, asking the reeve to show them where the assault had taken place. On the other side of the village, past the strip-fields that ran at right angles to the track, was an area of meadow, the grass now short and stiff with frost. Beyond that was the wasteland, a large area where trees had been felled to increase the arable area but which still had trunks and roots sticking up as far as the edge of the dark forest. At the top of this slope was a grassy mound, disfigured on one side by fresh red earth thrown out of an excavation a couple of feet deep.

‘They didn’t get very far down, as we disturbed them,’ said the reeve. ‘Anyway, they were wasting their time, as my father told me that his father and some other men had dug right through it fifty years ago and found nothing but some old pots and bones.’

On the way back to Exeter, John de Wolfe mused on what little they had learned in Clyst St Mary. ‘The bailiff will survive, but what happened is part of this mania that is sweeping the district. They’ll be digging into molehills next in the hope of finding gold!’

Thomas had a question, as usual. ‘Are these the same men who attacked the proctor, I wonder?’

‘No reason to think so,’ grunted Gwyn. ‘Every jackass in the county is wielding a spade these days.’

‘But they were very violent and both the reeve and the bailiff had the notion that one of them was a cleric,’ objected Thomas.

‘You may be right, young man,’ agreed de Wolfe. ‘I think it’s time we set that trap I mentioned, but it must be done carefully to catch the right vermin.’

That night the coroner’s clerk finished his copy of the Black Book and spent until the midnight hour stitching the few pages into the covers. Having spent much of his life with books and documents, he was quite adept at simple assembling and binding. Encasing Brân’s book with leather would have to wait until another day, as he needed to get some more oxhide glue from a tannery on Exe Island.

After morning services had finished in the cathedral, Thomas could not resist studying the quatrains yet again and gave up his dinner to go back to the library and pore over the obscure verses. He was particularly anxious to see if he could recognize any that might have relevance to the present time, but another two hours’ study left him as baffled as ever. Some of the other clerks were very curious as to what he was doing, and as they all knew of the circumstances of the ransacking of the library and the killing of the proctor Thomas had no option but to tell them of the Black Book and to show it to them, as clerics were more nosy and gossipy than most goodwives in the marketplace.

Later that day he returned with the glue to sheath the boards in thin black leather, trying to make the copy as similar as he could to the original ancient tome. With the book in a screw-press in the corner of the upper room, to allow the glue to set, he decided to take the original back to his lodgings in Priest Street
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, so that he could spend more hours on it that evening. With a couple of candle ends salvaged from a side altar, he once again sat to rack his brains over the strange verses. He shared the small room with a vicar-choral, for, as the name suggested, many of the houses in Priest Street were rented out as tenements to junior clerics. Tonight, his roommate had gone to visit his sick sister in the city, and Thomas was glad of the solitude to puzzle over Brân’s prophecies.

Once again he carefully read through the two dozen quatrains, searching for anything that might suggest a contemporary meaning. Eventually, he settled on one that with a stretch of imagination might relate to the present time. It was the fifth in the series, and his lips again whispered the words as he read them through once more:

Thomas huddled deeper into his thin cloak, as the only fire in the house was in a communal room at the back and the cold seemed to be addling his mind.

‘Only the first line means anything to me,’ he murmured to himself, wiping a dewdrop from the end of his nose with the back of his hand. ‘“When three golden beasts did reign by bishop’s rule . . .” Surely that could mean the kingship of our sovereign Richard the Lion-heart?’ He reasoned that this could refer to the new heraldic device adopted by Richard, showing three golden lions couchant on a red field. And surely the ‘bishop’s rule’ by which they reigned could be Hubert Walter’s regency, as the Prelate of Canterbury and Chief Justiciar had been given absolute control of England by the Lionheart, who seemed uninterested in ever returning to his island kingdom.

But what on God’s earth did the other three lines mean? It could be something that was going to happen during Richard’s reign, but that might last another thirty years, if his father Henry’s monarchy was anything to go by. And where would it happen, in England or abroad? Exeter was further from London than parts of France, so news of what was happening in the capital percolated slowly and imperfectly down to Devon. Maybe there was some bearded champion rampant at the other end of England, for all Thomas knew.

He had a faint glimmer of intuition about ‘edicts cruel’, as it was common knowledge that the harsh taxation imposed by the king through Hubert Walter was increasingly unpopular everywhere, especially in the cities, where the brunt of the levy was suffered. King Richard’s insatiable demand for more money to finance his army fighting to regain lands lost to Philip of France by his brother Prince John was becoming so painful to barons, the Church and common folk alike that whispers of rebellion had been heard here and there.

But that still made no sense of the rest of the verse – the ‘budding elm’ meant nothing to Thomas, nor did the ‘secret horde’. He sat brooding at the small table that, apart from one stool and two mattresses on the floor, was the only furniture in the room. Who else could he discuss this with, he wondered? Canon Jordan seemed almost frightened of the Black Book and wanted to get rid of it, let alone discuss its contents. Brother Rufus was happy to talk about it, but Thomas suspected that their already lengthy discussions had exhausted the chaplain’s knowledge and ideas.

Perhaps the vicar who shared the room might be a foil upon whom he could bounce some ideas? Peter Quinel was not the brightest star in the cathedral’s priesthood, but he was an amiable and willing fellow and Thomas looked forward to showing him the verses and asking his opinion.

Some time later he heard the outer door opening, one that led from the street into a common passageway to the several rooms. He looked up expectantly, eager to engage Peter in discussion, but the heavy leather flap that closed the doorway of their room did not swing aside. Instead, he heard voices whispering outside, and with some trepidation the little clerk got up to see who was there. As he did so, two men burst into the room, large and menacing in the dim light. With a screech of terror, Thomas backed away, but he was bowled over in the small chamber and fell flying, thankfully across one of the beds.

‘There it is! On the table,’ growled one of the intruders, grabbing the Black Book. Almost paralysed with fright and expecting to be beaten to death like the proctor, Thomas cowered on the floor, shielding his head with his arms. In a trice, the two men had vanished as quickly as they had come, still muffled up in dark mantles, hoods pulled down over their faces.

Whimpering with fear, for he made no claims to be a hero, Thomas staggered to his feet as he heard the street door slam shut. He waited a moment to make sure the assailants had gone, then pushed his way into the passage and started shouting for the other residents, who were all asleep, making the most of the few hours before they had to get up for midnight Mass.

A few minutes later, after telling his story of the violent robbery, a couple of the bolder young priests ventured out into the street, but all they could do was to stare futilely up and down the empty lane for the thieves, who had long vanished into the darkness.

Next morning the coroner was furious when he heard of Thomas’s ordeal and the theft of the old book. He had no particular interest in it as such, other than as a possible lead to the murderers of the proctor, but as it had led to the attack on his clerk’s privacy and person, he was angry that an inoffensive little priest should have been exposed to such a fright.

‘Are these the same bastards who killed that proctor?’ asked Gwyn, who for all his teasing of Thomas was very protective of him against all comers.

De Wolfe was pacing restlessly up and down his chamber, his long face creased by a ferocious scowl. ‘I saw only one man running away from the Chapter House, but that affair in Clyst St Mary suggests that three of the swine are involved. They seem to operate only at night and wear dark clothing.’ He swung around to face his clerk, who as usual sat at the table with a quill in his hand. ‘Was there any sign of a third man last night, Thomas?’

‘Not in the room, Crowner. There may have been one in the passageway or at the street door, but I did not venture out until they had gone.’

‘And nothing about them suggested a priest this time?’

The clerk shook his head. ‘They wore black, as you said, but not clerical garb – though I admit my mind was not on such matters during the few seconds they were in the room!’

‘You said one of them spoke,’ grunted Gwyn ‘Was it a voice you recognized?’

‘All he said was “There’s the book” or somesuch words. It was a local voice, but not particularly coarse like some labouring peasant.’

John paced a few more turns around the bleak room. ‘The one who attacked the proctor must have been able to read, to pick upon that particular book with a mention of treasure in one of the verses,’ he said. ‘But last night any ruffian could have recognized a black book without being able to read it.’