City of Fiends

by Michael Jecks

  Henry avoided the man’s look. It was a bit much to expect a man like him to stand out here in the alley all night. He was relieved to hear William Marsille say he would stand guard for the first half of the night, his brother for the second. They were younger, after all. Better suited for this sort of duty.

  There was a sharp cry from behind him, and Henry turned to see Juliana Marsille pelting down the narrow way.

  ‘What is this? Oh, God, no!’ she cried as she saw the body, and looked as if she might faint at any moment.

  ‘Mother, it’s fine,’ William said quickly, stepping around the body and holding out his hands. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll guard her till morning. That’s all.’

  But Henry had seen the way her eyes had gone to her sons – accusingly, or so he thought.

  Petreshayes Manor

  Sir Charles walked about the manor with the excitement of the battle still thrumming in his blood.

  He had been alarmed when some of the men had formed a wall before the manor’s doors, but it took only one charge of his mounted force to shatter that, and soon all the villeins were dead, while a few of the manor’s lay brothers were captured. Two were too badly injured to be of any help, and Sir Charles motioned to his men to finish them off. They died quickly.

  The others soon led him to where the Bishop’s accounts and money were stored. There was a good strongbox in a locked cellar, and the key on the dead steward’s belt opened both.

  ‘Bring the Bishop’s carts in here,’ he shouted at the men milling in the open yard area before the manor, and walking inside again.

  The buttery had a small barrel of good Bordeaux wine, and he broached it, filling a horn he found on a shelf. Draining it, he topped it up and walked to the hall.

  Ulric was in there, sitting with his back to the wall, arms about his knees.

  ‘Boy! You will keep this horn filled for me.’

  Ulric looked up, but said nothing.

  ‘I can understand your feelings,’ Sir Charles said. ‘You think I have forced you to betray your faith, to make you complicit in the death of the Bishop.’

  ‘I didn’t know I was sent to ensure my Lord Bishop’s murder!’

  ‘No. I daresay you didn’t,’ Sir Charles said. He sipped. ‘But in reality I have not. I have helped you to ensure that God’s will is done. Would you gainsay His wishes?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘The Bishop was installed after the death of Sir Walter Stapledon, who died in London last year, and the Canons of Exeter elected Bishop Berkeley. But the Pope did not. The Pope was hoping for another. And the Pope is God’s own vicar on earth, is he not? Quite.’

  ‘He was the Bishop, though.’

  ‘He was the brother of Lord Berkeley, who is holding your King in his gaol. King Edward, who was anointed by God as King of England, was captured by traitors, and even now is in a cell, while his son has been told to take his throne from him.’

  ‘How does killing the Bishop help?’

  Sir Charles was becoming irritated. ‘His death will begin to bring Lord Berkeley to reconsider, I hope. Berkeley has betrayed his own oaths to his King, and this is but the first of his punishments. And meanwhile…’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Meanwhile, my horn is empty, boy. Fetch me wine!’ Sir Charles rasped.

  There was no need to tell Ulric about the other force, led by the Dunheved brothers, who even now would be trying to release the King from his prison at Berkeley Castle.

  For the death of Bishop Berkeley was only the beginning. Soon, armed men would rise up all over the country, working to destabilise this inept and illegal government, and return King Edward II to his throne.

  Paffards’ House

  Joan sat on her palliasse, her arms wrapped about her legs as she shivered, staring at the door.

  She had a vision rising up before her horrified eyes: Alice’s body. But even as she saw her friend’s dead face another picture intruded: naked bodies writhing on the floor beside the fire, the orange flames illuminating their passion. It was so shocking, she had gasped.

  And then Gregory Paffard heard her; he looked up and saw her and his little brother Thomas watching, and there was rage in his eyes. The sort of rage that promises punishment and retribution.

  She was petrified.

  Precentor’s House, Exeter Cathedral

  Morrow of the Feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist1

  He was not fussy, he told himself as he sat at his table, but he did like things just so.

  If asked, Adam Murimuth would have described himself as an affable man in his fifty-second year. His face had the look of one who had never known hunger or hardship. He had spent all his adult life in the Church, and was a Doctor of Civil Law as well as being a priest. He enjoyed the trust of the Pope and of kings, and his friendship was sought out by bishops – which was why he was simultaneously a Canon of Hereford and Exeter.

  For some years he had clambered up the ladder of promotion in the Church. He had taken patronage where it was available, buying positions when he could, retaining friends who were powerful, discarding those who could embarrass him. He was a highly respected figure – and yet here he was, scrabbling about, trying to find a knife for his quill.

  It was annoying. When he came to his table this morning he discovered that his little penknife was missing, and that his ink had been mixed weak. His quill, a good new one, was unprepared, and how on earth could he write his journal without a decent pen?

  He had begun to write this little memoir twenty years ago. Of course, then he had still been a callow young man, without the experience that life could bring. No man, he believed, should contemplate recording a life until he had lived one.

  At last he found his knife on the floor, where it had fallen beneath the table. He stripped the fletchings from his quill and began laboriously to shape the pen’s end. Satisfied, he dipped it into the insipid ink and stared at the greyish staining on the nib with distaste while he prepared himself to write. For some moments he did not move, holding the quill over the paper, staring at the window ahead of him, the strip of parchment as blank as his mind.

  Mornings like this were infuriating. There was nothing much to note. Little happened in this quiet little Close. There was some bickering about how the Close was looking, scruffy and unkempt, with horses wandering over the grass, men standing and haggling over deals, or gambling or brawling – even women plying their unsavoury trade. He had found one rutting with her client behind the Treasurer’s House last week – a disgraceful site for fornication!

  But these were not the memories he wished to record. Ach!

  Setting the quill on his desk, he rose and walked around his room, head down, contemplating, and then as inspiration suddenly came to him, he resumed his seat and picked up his quill once more.

  The door opened and his steward slid around it like oil under a gate. Adam looked up irritably. ‘What on earth is the matter? You know that this is my time to write.’

  ‘Sir, I am sorry, but Janekyn would like to speak with you.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Something to do with the murder last night.’

  ‘Murder? What – here?’ Adam hadn’t heard of a killing. ‘In the Close, do you mean?’

  ‘No, sir, out along Combe Street, I heard.’

  ‘What of it? It’s a city matter. Oh, never mind. Show him in,’ Adam said grumpily. He put his pen back down and stared at the empty sheet. Today, he felt sure, he would never write a thing.

  Soon Janekyn Beyvyn, the porter from the Broad Gate of the Close, entered, shooting little glances all about him with that expression of nervous awe that servants so often exhibited. They were unused to such magnificence.

  ‘Porter, my steward tells me you want to speak to me. Well?’

  Janekyn nodded. ‘Sir, last night there was a maid killed. It was a way away, but as I was closing the gates, I heard running.’

  ‘Did you see the man?’

  ‘No, sir.�
��

  ‘So, then? What of it?’

  ‘My fear was, where the footsteps went.’

  ‘Explain yourself, man!’

  Janekyn cleared his throat. ‘I think they came into the Close, sir. It was someone from the Cathedral.’

  * * *

  Thursday, 25 June 1327.↩︎

  Chapter Three

  Combe Street, Exeter

  It had been an unprofitable day for William Marsille. Again.

  He had set aside thoughts of Alice lying dead in the alley as soon as he had risen, and had come here to the Cathedral in the hope that his prayers might succeed in winning him work with the masons. He must earn some money somehow, and he had tried every other possible avenue.

  He had hoped that sheer determination and persistence would persuade a mason or carpenter to hire him, but they only laughed at him.

  ‘Come here, boy,’ one had called, a heavy-set man a clear six inches shorter than William. He’d been to a barber recently, so his beard and head were well shaven as he pinched and prodded William’s arms. ‘Did you ever have a muscle on them, boy?’ he laughed.

  Another man was behind him, and he squeezed the flesh of William’s thighs and buttocks hard enough to hurt. ‘He couldn’t carry a hod, and those spindleshank legs of his won’t drive the treadmill.’

  The first was eyeing him up and down. ‘Give me your hands… thought so. You’ve never done a day’s real work, have you, boy?’

  ‘I can add, write and read, and I’m used to accounting.’

  ‘Then go and speak to someone who has need of such skills. We don’t. We need carpenters, masons, plumbers and all the others who can help build a cathedral, not parchment-scratchers. Well?’ he said, standing back, arms akimbo. ‘Go on, get up there.’

  ‘Where?’

  The mason pointed to the nearest ladder. ‘There. That one’ll do.’

  William stared at it. The thing was immensely long, reaching up to the third level. The larch poles of the scaffolding had some kind of rope that bound the cross members to each other, and while William had heard that sailors tended to be used for lashing the poles to each other, he could see clearly that the ladder had nothing to hold it steady.

  ‘What ails you?’ the mason said, and the others all laughed.

  He walked to the ladder, set his hands on the rough rung, and began to climb. He did so with a steady carefulness, and a rising panic as, after ten or twelve feet, the whole contraption began to bounce. It felt as though he must be catapulted from it, and his speed slowed as he approached the middle. Here it was terrifying. He clung with knuckles whitened, as the ladder sprang in and out, towards the new cathedral walls, and away again. His thighs turned to water. He could no more climb than jump, and he had to set his entire body flat against the madly bouncing contraption, his eyes shut. Surely it would fly away from the wall at any moment.

  Looking down, he saw that all the masons had left. He was alone, desolate in his failure. Slowly, he let himself down to solid ground once more.

  Thrusting his thumbs in his belt, he walked down the Close and went out by the Bear Gate. While there, he saw the old beggar woman who had her post there. Reaching into his purse, he was about to throw her a penny, when he realised he had nothing. She had more money than he. With a mumbled apology, shame firing his face a dull beetroot, he scurried past her, and out to Southgate Street.

  Here he almost bumped into someone. William tried to apologise, but his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth.

  The man was his height, with pale, waxen features, and a long, straggling beard that reached to his middle-breast. His clothing was a mixture of tattered shreds: there was a once-good tunic that was sorely worn, a fustian cloak, and hessian sacking covered his legs. In a bundle he clutched to his chest were all his worldly belongings. But it was his eyes that caught William’s attention. They were wild, terrified. The eyes of a man who had lost everything, and knew that life would never improve. He must walk, and hope to find food. That was his entire life.

  William stared after him. That sight, he felt, was a revelation. An appalling picture of how he might look in a short time, if he and Philip could find no work and money: a desperate vagrant dependent upon the alms of the Church just to exist.

  Petreshayes

  Sir Charles stood at the gateway and donned his worn riding gloves as he watched the three men. They were gathering with their torches about a brazier. The two survivors of the manor were in the doorway, hands bound, and Sir Charles nodded to the two guards with them.

  He turned and took his horse’s reins from Ulric. ‘Watch,’ he said, slipping his boot into the stirrup and springing up into his saddle.

  The lad was still looking very pale. Sir Charles had almost expected him to fly from the place in the dead of night, and it was with a vague sense of pride that he had beheld Ulric’s earnest features this morning.

  Sir Charles knew what was happening without watching. The two men took their daggers and stabbed, one quickly thrusting in his victim’s back, the other sweeping his blade about the man’s throat.

  Ulric winced, and tottered as though he was going to fall, but then threw a look at Sir Charles. ‘What, are you telling me you will do that to me in a moment?’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘No, my fellow. I am merely showing you what will be happening all over here soon. The King will be fighting for his kingdom, and all those who stand in his path will die, like them. It is the way of war, the way of the chevauchée. When there is war, men-at-arms will ride all about the country, creating fear and panic in the hearts of those who stand against them. We must do this now. And while we do, others will take up arms against us, and they will terrorise our friends and family. If you want, you can go back to the city, and live there.’

  Ulric looked down. The man with the slashed throat was squirming ever more slowly, his blood staining the ground. At his side, the other man was already dead, an expression of surprise on his face.

  ‘Choose, then. Are you with us, with your lawful King, the man anointed by God, or not?’

  ‘I am with you,’ Ulric said dully.

  ‘Good! Mount your beast, boy,’ Sir Charles said with a smile. He glanced at the three with the torches and jerked his head. In a moment, all three had lighted their torches and then flung them in through the open doorway. There was a whump as the oils drizzled over the floor and beams caught fire, and almost immediately a thick, black smoke roiled from the door and open window.

  Sir Charles eyed it with satisfaction. ‘Come, my friends! It is time to visit terror on Devon!’

  Rougemont Castle, Exeter

  Adam Murimuth walked in at the red sandstone gate and peered about him.

  He did not like this castle. As Precentor, he had had to come here on various occasions. The last had been in the spring, when there had been a fight in the High Street near the Guild Hall. Two servants of the Cathedral had been rightly infuriated to see a Dominican preaching to some folk, and had remonstrated. The friar loudly rejected their justified arguments, and a small crowd gathered.

  As the dispute grew more heated, locals joined to take sides, and in the end it was necessary for some men-at-arms to come to cool tempers. Not that they had succeeded. The ensuing fracas had been ended only when a few sensible traders managed to calm the troubled folk.

  And the cause of the escalating violence? The preacher and the servants were abusing each other in fluent Latin, the locals had interjected in their mixed languages, some in Celtic, some in English, while the castle’s men had reverted to Norman French when they lost their tempers. In the babel that ensued, it was only when three merchants fluent in a variety of languages had interposed, that peace was restored.

  The castle was a symbol of the power of the Sheriff, and Adam resented the man and his authority. However, thankfully Sheriff de Cockington had no control over the Cathedral or its staff.

  ‘Sheriff,’ Adam began when at last he was permitted to enter file hall itself, ‘I fear
that there has been a death in the city.’

  ‘Aye, a maid was murdered. What of it?’

  ‘I wished to know what the Coroner thinks of the matter.’

  The Sheriff gazed at him. He was a pompous fellow, this James de Cockington, Murimuth thought. He remembered his pale eyes staring at him before, with that same look, when they were discussing the fight in the High Street. Even then, he had been certain that the man was searching for a way to request a bribe, rather than seek resolution.

  ‘What is a murder in the city to do with the Cathedral, Precentor?’ he asked smoothly.

  ‘Probably nothing. But it occurred near enough to the Close for us to hear it. When will the Coroner be here to review the matter?’

  The Sheriff sucked at his teeth. ‘Perhaps the day after tomorrow – maybe not until Sunday. He has been away, down at Ashburton. A tin miner was found hanged down there, and the Coroner left yesterday. It is a full day’s ride to Ashburton, since the roads are appalling. I would think he would hold his inquest today or tomorrow, and return Saturday.’

  ‘Good, good,’ Murimuth said.

  ‘You will wish to send a witness to hear the evidence?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Murimuth ducked his head, preparatory to making his exit. He disliked dissembling. There were situations in which he felt comfortable, but this was not one of them. The Sheriff never impressed him with his intellect, but the man was the King’s own representative.

  ‘It would almost seem as if you knew something about this murder, Precentor,’ the Sheriff said. ‘Do you know who was responsible?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ Murimuth said. ‘If I did, I would say so, to prevent another innocent being accused. Murder is a grave matter.’

  That was the fact that absorbed him as he left the castle. Murder was indeed a serious affair, and if Janekyn was right, the murderer could have been one of the Cathedral’s inhabitants.