The Witch Hunter (3 page)

‘This is surely Robert de Pridias, of the weavers’ guild,’ he exclaimed in concern. The pallid features looked very different in death and he squinted at them from several angles, then bobbed his head in confirmation. ‘No doubt about it, it’s de Pridias, poor fellow.’

The reeve, an emaciated fellow with a skeletal face and a hacking cough which suggested he had the phthisis, offered the parchments to the newcomer, but he shook his head.

‘I can’t read those, I do all my trading on tally sticks! But it’s him alright, he owns a fulling mill on Exe Island.’

This was the large area of flat, marshy ground just outside the city. Exeter was built on a marked slope, running down from its castle on the east side to the river on the west. The swampy island was cut through by leats and gullies and after heavy rains up on Exmoor, these often overflowed to flood the low-lying ground and the mean huts of the wool workers perched upon it. However, the many fulling mills that cleaned and prepared the raw wool needed great quantities of water and the site was ideal for industries such as those of the late Robert de Pridias.

When the traveller was told how his fellow-citizen had fallen dead across his horse, he offered to take the sad news to his family. ‘I can be at his house in well under the hour,’ he said solicitously. ‘Where shall I tell his family to seek his body?’

The reeve looked at the ale-wife, but she shook her head firmly. ‘No, I’m not having a corpse in my taproom, it’s bad for trade. The church is the place for him.’

With an assurance that the fuller would be handled reverently, the merchant rode off with his doleful message. The reeve called two younger men from the nearest strip-field and they went to fetch the village bier, a wooden trestle with handles at each end, which was kept hanging from the roof beams of the church. On this they carried Robert into the small building and left him lying before the altar until the priest returned. However, the family arrived first, within two hours of the messenger leaving Alphington. The first was the son-in-law, Roger Hamund, whose feelings of grief were secretly alleviated by the unexpected prospect of inheriting de Pridias’s business. He had cantered ahead in his enthusiasm, but within a few minutes his wife and mother-in-law appeared, sitting side-saddle on their palfreys, escorted by their household steward. They were all well dressed and well fed, contrasting markedly with the threadbare inhabitants of the village, as they stalked past them into the church.

The new widow, Cecilia de Pridias, marched towards the tiny chancel and stood looking down at her dead husband, more in anger than desolation.

‘I knew it, I knew something like this would happen!’ she snapped, sounding as if her husband had dropped dead purely to annoy her.

Roger Hamund stared at her, habitually open mouthed because of his adenoids. He was not an intelligent man and his mother-in-law’s strong personality always overawed him.

‘He must have had a stroke, Mother,’ he ventured tentatively. ‘The apothecary said he was in poor health.’

‘Nonsense, boy!’ grated Cecilia. ‘He was done to death by that swine Henry de Hocforde and I’m going to call the coroner.’

Though by August the long summer days were beginning to shorten, there was still plenty of time for Roger Hamund to ride back to the city and fetch Sir John de Wolfe. He found him in his dismal chamber at the top of the tall gatehouse of Rougemont Castle, listening to his clerk reciting some inquest proceedings from a parchment roll. The soldier on guard duty at the gate had directed him up the steep, winding staircase inside the tower and when he pushed his way through the sacking curtain that hung over the low doorway at the top, he found himself in a small room with rough stone walls and two narrow unglazed windows. The furniture consisted of a crude trestle table flanked by a couple of stools, which were occupied by a little man with a slightly humped shoulder and a tall, gaunt figure dressed in a grey tunic. The light from one of the windows was blocked by a giant of a man sitting on the sill, pouring ale from a large pot into his mouth, which was just visible beneath a huge ginger moustache which matched a wild thatch of hair.

The visitor knew all three by sight, as did most of the inhabitants of Exeter, for the coroner’s team was a familiar and usually unwelcome sight about the city. Wherever a King’s crowner appeared, it usually meant either a death or a lightening of the purse – and often both.

Roger stood hesitantly inside the doorway and addressed himself to the lean, forbidding figure behind the table, whose swept-back ebony hair and dark-stubbled cheeks made it easy to believe that the troops in his campaigning days had nicknamed him‘Black John’. Now he was known as‘Crowner John’, and beneath the beetling brows, the deep-set eyes that used to rove over battlefields now sought out the crimes and tragedies that beset Devonshire.

‘Sir John? I have come with a sad request for you to attend the body of my father-in-law, who has died suddenly and most unexpectedly.’

Three pairs of eyes swivelled around to stare at him. He was a podgy fellow of about twenty-eight, amiable but indecisive. His wife, a younger version of her formidable mother, directed his life from the security of their home near the East Gate, though she acted meekly and demurely enough when out in company.

The coroner aimed his predatory hooked nose in the man’s direction and scowled at him ferociously. ‘Why should his death concern me, sir? Was he beaten, kicked or stabbed?’

Roger shuffled his elegantly clad feet uneasily.

‘He fell dead across his horse, Crowner. I would think some form of apoplexy was the most likely cause, but his wife is insistent that he was put under a malignant spell.’

The little clerk’s eyebrows rose and he rapidly made the sign of the Cross. ‘A spell? Nonsense, there is no such thing, it is against the precepts and teachings of the Holy Church!’ he squeaked indignantly.

Roger recoiled slightly at Thomas de Peyne’s vehemence. Although he had seen the clerk about the town, at close quarters he even more strongly resembled a priest, in his threadbare black cassock and the shaved tonsure on top of his head. A pair of bright little eyes darted intelligently from a thin face, which carried a long pointed nose and receding chin.

‘My mother-in-law is convinced he was done to death. There have been threats uttered against him and she claims it is murder.’

John de Wolfe rumbled in his throat, his usual way of expressing disbelief. ‘I have been the King’s coroner for almost a year now, but this is the first time that witchcraft has been alleged as a cause of death.’

He managed not to sound sarcastic and Roger Hamund was encouraged to carry on, mindful of the tongue-lashing he would get from Cecilia if he failed to return without de Wolfe.

‘There was certainly bad blood between him and another merchant,’ he said carefully, not wanting to name another influential citizen whose patronage might yet prove useful. ‘Perhaps it were best if my mother-in-law explained the situation herself.’

‘So who is the dead ’un?’ demanded the untidy giant from the window sill. This was Gwyn of Polruan, a former Cornish fisherman who had been Sir John’s squire, bodyguard and companion for almost twenty years of fighting from Ireland to the Holy Land and who now acted as the coroner’s officer. He was not renowned for his sensitivity and Roger cringed at the description of his father-in-law as ‘the dead ’un’.

‘It is Robert de Pridias, Crowner, the master of the guild of weavers in this city.’

John’s black brows rose at this. He knew de Pridias slightly, as he had done some business with him over the last year or so. Since hanging up his sword after returning from the Third Crusade, de Wolfe had ploughed much of his campaign plunder into a wool business. He was a sleeping partner to his friend Hugh de Relaga, a prominent burgess and one of the two portreeves that ran the city council. Though they exported most of their wool purchases to Flanders, Brittany and the Rhine, they sold some locally to the fulling mills and Robert de Pridias had been one of their customers, so John felt that perhaps he should indulge his widow’s fantasies about murder. Rising from behind the table, he stood with his characteristic slight stoop and looked down at his little clerk.

‘Get on and finish those other rolls, Thomas, they’ll be needed at the Shire Court tomorrow.’

With a jerk of his head to Gwyn, he left Thomas reaching thankfully for his pen and ink. The clerk disliked both corpses and sitting on a pony to get to them. De Wolfe ushered Roger to the stairs and Gwyn lumbered after them.

The newly bereaved son-in-law explained where de Pridias was lying and on reaching the arch of the gatehouse the coroner led them across the inner ward of the castle to one of the lean-to sheds where their horses were tethered. Though it had been a very wet summer, the last two weeks had been unusually dry and the almost grassless mud of the ward had dried into hard rough-cast, churned by the hoofs of horses and oxen, wagon wheels and soldiers’ boots.

Rougemont took its name from the red sandstone from which it had been built by William the Bastard soon after the Conquest. It occupied the high north-east corner of Exeter, in the angle of the city walls first built by the Romans and improved upon by both the subsequent invaders, the Saxons and the Normans. The inner ward was demarcated by a high wall, pierced by the gatehouse, which guarded a drawbridge over a deep ditch. This led out into the much larger quadrant of the outer ward, bounded by another ditch and an embankment topped by a palisade. The Conqueror had torn down over fifty Saxon houses to make space for his new fortifications. Three buildings stood inside the inner walls – the tiny chapel of St Mary, the bare stone box of the Shire Hall and the larger two-storey keep near the far end, where the sheriff and the castellan lived. All around the inside of the walls were sheds and lean-to buildings, which housed forges, stables and living quarters for soldiers and a few families.

An ostler saw them coming and with a boy, led out Odin, de Wolfe’s retired warhorse, together with Gwyn’s big brown mare. Roger’s gelding was hitched to a rail outside the stable and when all three were mounted, they trotted back out beneath the portcullis and down into the outer ward. This large area was part village and part army camp, where most of the garrison and their families lived in huts and shanties behind the outer line of defences, which had not been needed for the past fifty years since the civil war between Stephen and Matilda.

At the bottom of Castle Hill, the road joined the high street, which ran from the East Gate to Carfoix, the central crossing of the streets that joined the four main gates of the city. Beyond that, Fore Street dipped steeply down towards the river. They pushed their way through the crowded narrow streets, jostling aside townsfolk lingering at the stalls and booths along the sides of the main thoroughfare. Porters pushing barrows or bent double under bales of wool stumbled out of their way and beggars shrank back out of reach of the hoofs of the three horses.

Near the bottom of Fore Street, the West Gate let them out on to Exe Island. There was a wooden footbridge across the main channel of the Exe, but the grand new stone bridge lay half completed, as the builder, Nicholas Gervase, had run out of funds. With the tide out and the water at a low level from the recent dry weather, they splashed across the ford with their stirrups clear of the surface and went up the far bank to complete the mile to Alphington. Roger Hamund seemed reluctant to enlarge upon the circumstances of the death and was relieved to see his wife and mother-in-law waiting with a small knot of people at the entrance to the churchyard.

Willing hands took the reins as they slid from their horses and the sickly manor-reeve came forward to knuckle his forehead to the coroner. He had never had dealings with this official before and was vague as to his functions – but all he had heard by way of gossip seemed to indicate that unless you trod very carefully you risked getting both the length of his tongue and a hefty amercement.

‘The cadaver’s in the church, Crowner. We sent for you straight away, though there’s no call to think it was anything but a seizure.’

He said this deliberately, as if the death was not natural, a ‘hue and cry’ should have been set up to chase any possible culprit and the failure to do so might be grounds for the first of the unwelcome fines. However, his words were brushed aside by the advancing figure of the widow, Cecilia de Pridias. She was a formidable woman of ample proportions, with a bust like the prow of a ship.

‘Nonsense, my poor husband was done to death by some cunning means!’ she snapped, in a voice that reminded John of the crack of a whip. ‘There have been omens these past few weeks. I know the signs, someone has caused a spell to be put upon him. He told me he had presentiments of death.’

De Wolfe sighed, as it was obvious that she was going to be a difficult woman to placate. Like her daughter, who stood behind her, and her son-in-law, she was round of face as well as body, showing that the de Pridias family were affluent enough to over-eat. She wore a dark red kirtle of light wool, with a gold tasselled cord wrapped around her full waist. Instead of a wimple and cover-chief around her head and neck, she had a tight-fitting helmet of white felt, tied firmly under the chin. A short summer cape of fawn wool hung around her shoulders.

‘Perhaps I had better view the body first, then you can tell me what you know,’ he said with a mildness that Gwyn felt was uncharacteristic. John had just remembered that Cecilia attended St Olave’s Church, where his own wife Matilda was a devout supplicant. They knew each other quite well and if he trod too heavily on Cecilia’s toes, he would suffer a verbal lashing at home when the complaints reached Matilda.

The reeve led the way into the little church, which had been built in Saxon times and was in dire need of repair or preferably rebuilding in stone. Architecturally, it was little different from a barn, but had a gabled entrance on the south side, through which they now trooped. John marched across the earthen floor to the flagstoned area at the other end, which served as the chancel. He stopped at the bier, which was like a wooden stretcher with legs, and looked down at the still figure, fully dressed, with his dusty riding boots hanging over the end. The ale-wife had crossed his hands over his chest and had closed his eyelids with her fingers before the stiffness of death set in.