The Tainted Coin (2 page)

Sinister:
to the left hand.

Solar:
a small private room in a castle, more easily heated than the great hall, where lords preferred to spend time, especially in winter. Usually on a castle’s upper floor.

Soul cakes:
small cakes given to children and the poor on All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day.

Stockfish:
inexpensive fish, usually dried cod or haddock, consumed on fast days.

Surcoat:
an overcoat.

Tenant:
a free peasant who rented land from his lord. He could pay his rent in labor on the lord’s demesne, or (more likely by the fourteenth century) in cash.

Terce:
the canonical office at 9 a.m.

Toft:
land surrounding a house. Often used for growing vegetables.

Valet:
a high-ranking servant to a lord – a chamberlain, for example.

Vigils:
the night office, celebrated at midnight. When the service was completed Benedictines went back to bed. Cistercians stayed up for the new day.

Villein:
a non-free peasant. He could not leave his manor or service to his lord, or sell animals without permission. But if he could escape his manor for a year and a day, he would be free.

Wattle:
interlacing sticks used as a foundation and support for daub (plaster) in building the walls of a house.

Whitsuntide:
Pentecost; seven weeks after Easter Sunday.

Yardland:
about thirty acres. Also called a virgate, and in northern England an oxgang.

Yeoman:
a freeholder below the rank of gentry, generally more prosperous than a tenant.

Chapter 1

I
would have preferred to remain in bed a while longer. The October morn was cool, my bed warm, but Bessie stirred in her cradle and Kate was already up and bringing the coals to life upon our hearth. I arose, clothed myself hurriedly, and bent to lift my daughter from her cot. She smiled up at me from the woolen layers into which Kate had tucked her the night before. Elizabeth was now nearly a year old, and beginning to sleep through the night, much to Kate’s joy, and my own. Children are a blessing from God, but not when they awaken before dawn and demand to be fed.

I had placed the babe upon my shoulder and turned to the stairs, when from below I heard an unwelcome pounding upon Galen House’s door. When some man wishes my attention so soon after the morning Angelus Bell has rung, it can be to no good purpose. A window was near, so rather than hasten down the stairs, I opened it to see who was at my door so early in the morn.

My visitor heard the window open above him and when I peered down I looked into the gaunt, upraised face of John Kellet, curate at St. Andrew’s Chapel.

“Master Hugh,” he shouted, “you must come at once. There is a man wounded and near dead at St. Andrew’s Chapel. Bring your instruments and make haste!”

I did so. Kate had heard Kellet’s appeal and awaited me at the foot of the stairs. She took Bessie from me, and over her shoulder I saw my breakfast awaiting upon our table – a loaf and ale. It must wait. I filled a sack with instruments and herbs from my chest, unbarred the door, and stepped into the foggy dawn.

“Quickly, Master Hugh,” the skeletal priest urged, and set off down Church View Street at a trot, his bare, boney feet raising puffs of dust from the dry dirt of the street. I flung my sack over a shoulder and followed. I had questions about this abrupt summons, but Kellet was already too far ahead to allow conversation. I loped after the priest, the sack bouncing against my back.

Kellet led me to the High Street, thence up Bushey Row to the path to St. Andrew’s Chapel. The parish Church of St. Beornwald is a grand structure, but the chapel is old and small. ’Tis little more than a quarter of a mile from Bampton to the chapel, and soon the ancient building appeared in the fog. Kellet plunged through the decrepit lychgate and led me to the porch. There, upon the flags, I saw a man. The priest had placed the fellow upon a pallet so he did not rest upon the hard stones. I bent over the silent form and thought Kellet’s trouble unnecessary, for the man before me seemed insensible, if not already dead.

“Found ’im here at dawn, when I rose to ring the Angelus Bell. I heard a moan, so opened the door an’ found the fellow under the porch roof, just where he now lies. Put a pallet ’neath ’im an’ sought you. I could see ’e was bad off, even in so little light as in the porch.”

The curate lived in the chapel tower, in a bare room but four paces on a side. He need not go far from his bed to ring the bell of St. Andrew’s Chapel, for the bell-rope fell through a hole in the center of his chamber to the base of the tower at ground level.

The porch lay in shadow, so the nature of the man’s wounds was obscure. I asked Kellet to take one end of the pallet, and I grasped the other. Together we lifted the unconscious stranger to the churchyard where the rising sun was visible through the thinning fog and his wounds and injuries became apparent.

The man had been beaten senseless. His nose was broken and askew, his scalp lacerated just above an ear where a blow had found his skull, his lips were purple and swollen, and it seemed sure his jaw was broken and teeth were knocked loose.

“You heard him moan when you rose to ring the Angelus Bell?”

“Aye,” Kellet replied.

“Did he say anything when you found him?”

“Nay. He was as you see ’im now.”

Whoever this man was, he had used the last of his strength to reach sanctuary, as I think he assumed the ancient chapel to be. I looked closely at the face, but could not recognize him as any man I knew. I asked the priest if he knew the fellow.

“Nay. ’Course, he’s so abused, he might be someone I know. In his state his own mother’d not know ’im, I think.”

I silently agreed with the priest, then bent to examine the man’s injuries more closely to learn was there anything I might do to save his life and speed healing of his wounds.

I am Hugh de Singleton, surgeon, trained at the University of Paris, and also bailiff to Lord Gilbert Talbot at his lands in Bampton. Many would find the work I must do as surgeon disagreeable, repairing men’s bodies when they have done themselves harm, but I find my duties as bailiff, collecting fines and dealing with obstreperous tenants, more irksome.

With my dagger I cut away the wounded man’s cotehardie and kirtle, the better to inspect his hurts, and as I did so considered that the supine form presented me with two tasks: I must treat his injuries, and discover who had dealt with him so.

The man’s body presented as many wounds as his head. So many bruises covered his ribs that they might have been one great contusion. I tested one purple blemish and felt the ends of a broken rib move beneath my fingertips.

My examination roused the unconscious fellow. I saw his eyelids flicker, then open. Perhaps he saw my face above him, perhaps not. His eyes seemed not to focus, but drifted about, hesitating only briefly when they turned to me. Did he take me for a friend? Who can know? He surely did not think me one of his assailants, else he would not have spoken as he did.

With pain and effort he opened his swollen lips and said, so faintly I had to ask John Kellet if he heard the same words, “They didn’t get me coin.”

I had learned two things: whoso attacked the fellow had sought a coin, or perhaps many coins, and more than one had done this evil. I would learn no more from him, for as I began to inspect a bloody laceration between two ribs, his chest heaved and was then still.

“Dead?” Kellet asked after a moment.

“Aye. You must think back on finding the fellow. Is there anything you can remember of this morn which might tell who he is and who has done this?”

“I will think on it while I ring the Passing Bell. I have already offered Extreme Unction, before I sought you. I could see how ill used he was, even in the dark of the porch, and feared he might not live till I returned.”

“While you do so I will fetch the coroner. Hubert Shillside must convene a jury here before we may do any other thing.”

I heard Kellet ring the bell of St. Andrew’s Chapel as I left the churchyard and its tumbled-down wall. I noted several places where someone – Kellet, I presume – had replaced fallen stones so as to halt the decay. My eyes traveled to a section of the wall where, three years past, I had hidden to escape Thomas atte Bridge and the priest, who intended my death. Kellet, for this felony and others, was sent on pilgrimage to Compostela. He returned a transformed man, and was assigned to assist the almoner at the Priory of St. Nicholas, in Exeter. There he was so assiduous at seeking the poor that he came near to impoverishing the priory, it not being a wealthy house, and the prior beseeched the bishop to be rid of him. As no curate had been found for St. Andrew’s Chapel, Kellet was reassigned to the place. He left it three years past a corpulent hedonist, but returned a year ago an emaciated pauper, who wore no shoes at any season and gave to the poor nearly all of the meager living he was awarded as curate. I have never seen a man so reformed, and indeed, when first I learned of the change, doubted it was truly so. May the Lord Christ forgive me for mistrusting the alteration He can work in a repentant man’s life. All saints were once sinners, and any sinner may become a saint.

Hubert Shillside, Bampton’s haberdasher, was no more pleased than I had been to open his door so early, but accepted his duty as coroner, and when told of the death at St. Andrew’s Chapel, set out to assemble a jury while I walked to Church View Street and Galen House.

I told Kate of events at the chapel, hurriedly gobbled the loaf she had set out for me, swallowed a cup of ale, then set out again for the chapel. I arrived with Shillside and his coroner’s jury. The haberdasher asked of the priest what he knew of the corpse, and was told what I had already heard. Kellet could think of nothing more to explain the dead man’s condition.

All who viewed the corpse agreed that the death was murder, not misadventure, and so Shillside did readily declare. No weapon was to be found, so the coroner, no doubt hungry to break his fast, absolved himself and his jurymen of further responsibility in the matter and turned the death over to me.

As the coroner’s jury departed the place, I told Kellet to once again take in hand an end of the pallet. Together we carried the corpse through the porch, into the chapel, and deposited it on the flags before the altar.

“I’ll say a mass, have a grave dug, and bury the man this day,” the priest said.

I wished to know where this stranger had been attacked, to see if there might be at the place some evidence of his assailants. It could not have been close to the chapel, for he would have cried out when attacked, and Kellet would have heard him. But the dead man had been so badly injured that he would not have crawled far. I searched the grass of the churchyard for blood and found traces which led to the lychgate. The curate saw, and followed. Beyond the gate was the path, dry from absence of rain for the past fortnight. In the dust it was easy to follow the track of a crawling man back to the east, for the sun was now well up over the fields and meadow which bordered the narrow road. Nearly two hundred paces to the east the path entered a wood, and a few paces beyond that the marks of a crawling man disappeared into the verge.

I studied the place where the man had crawled from the forest. Why did he struggle to leave the place and crawl to St. Andrew’s Chapel? In his battered condition this required much effort. Was he familiar with Bampton, so that he knew help might be found could he reach the chapel?

John Kellet had followed from the chapel and with me studied the path where marks in the dust told of the man’s entry upon the road.

“Look there,” the priest said, and pointed a few paces beyond. Between road and forest was a swathe of dry grass and across this patch of vegetation two parallel tracks of bent-down foliage showed where a cart or similar wheeled conveyance had turned from the road and entered a narrow opening which led into the forest. Marks of the cart wheels and a horse’s hooves, and the footprints of men were visible in the dust of the path where the vehicle entered the wood, but although we searched for many paces in both directions from the place, neither Kellet nor I could find any mark where a cart might have left the wood and regained the road. Whatever had entered the forest was yet there.