A Corpse at St Andrew's Chapel

by Mel Starr

  I awoke from my slumber next morning itching from bites I had received while at my rest. Hallmote had met in the great hall the previous day, and some tenant or villein had brought with him to the assembly some unwanted guests. As my chamber opened directly off the hall, and in the night I was the nearest warm body available, the pests sought me out.

  In my chest there remained several bundles of fleabane I had gathered the previous summer. I took a bundle and broke the dried stems, leaves and faded flowers to small bits. These I placed in an earthen bowl, along with a coal from my faded fire. Then I closed the door and retreated to the hall.

  Shortly after I was gratified to see a wisp of smoke curl from under my door. Satisfied that the fleabane was smoldering well, I was about to seek the kitchen for a loaf when Alice atte Bridge appeared at the buttery and saw my smoking door.

  “Oh, sir!” she yelped, and turned to run for aid.

  With some difficulty I arrested her flight. She returned to the hall, gazing suspiciously at the fumes now pouring copiously from under my door. I thought some explanation in order.

  “’Tis fleabane. I was visited in the night, and am now driving off my callers.”

  Alice peered at me, uncomprehending.

  “Fleas,” I explained. “Some unwashed villein introduced them into the hall yesterday. They found a home in my chamber last night.”

  “Oh, sir…may I have some?”

  “Fleas?”

  “Nay, sir. Of them I have plenty. I sleep in a closet off the scullery, and they vex me now an’ then.”

  “I have more fleabane, but ’tis in the chamber and I must not disturb the fumes while they do their work. Return at the ninth hour and I will give you some.”

  “Thank you, sir.” The girl curtsied and ran gracefully off down the passage past the buttery door. I watched her scurry away. It was a rewarding experience. But I immediately felt sheepish for permitting my thoughts to wander so, with Alice but a child of fifteen years or so. Well, some tenant or servant to Lord Gilbert would have a fine wife in a few more years.

  I left my chamber to the smoke and set off to find breakfast. I warned the servants at the kitchen to take no notice of the vapors rising into the great hall from under my door, then went to my daily rounds.

  John Holcutt was busy seeing to the marling of a field and needed no advice on the matter from me. I walked to the meadow where the lamb was slain, but found only a few wisps of wool where the animal had lain. It was Richard Hatcher’s lamb. Doubtless what remained of it had become his dinner.

  I was returning to the castle for my own dinner when the sound of shouting and agitated voices reached me across the meadow. Above the distant cacophony I heard my name. What now, I wondered? Life in Bampton was returning to its settled, peaceful ways after Alan the beadle’s death. I wished for no interruption of that tranquility.

  I trotted across the meadow and walked rapidly down Mill Street past the castle toward town and the din. As I crossed the bridge over Shill Brook I saw a crowd milling before the blacksmith’s shop, where Church View Street entered Bridge Street. Some in the throng saw me approach and I was immediately hailed and urged to make haste. I did.

  The knot of onlookers parted as I approached and in their shadow I saw a man lying in the street in a great pool of blood. One hand twitched at his side, the other was clasped to his neck. Between the fingers clutching his throat blood flowed in a copious stream. I knelt in the dirt and saw the man’s eyes follow me as I examined the wound under his fingers. Something, or someone, had slashed through the great vein. He had only minutes to live unless I could staunch the flow of blood.

  “A cloth,” I shouted. “A clean cloth – quickly!”

  A housewife in the crowd presented her apron. It was flour-dusted but clean enough. I pried the fellow’s hand from his wound and pressed the folded cloth tight against the gash.

  I required my instruments, but could not leave my patient to fetch them. From the corner of my eye I saw a youth who had won a footrace last autumn at Michaelmas. I called to him.

  “Run to the castle and fetch my instruments.” The youth gazed at me blankly. “Find Alice, the scullery maid. She knows the box where they are kept. My chamber will be clouded with smoke…pay that no mind. Run! Be off!”

  The mob parted and the youth sprinted away toward the castle. I returned my attention to the pale form at my knees. Blood seeped from under the folded apron, but not so profusely as before.

  “Who is this?” I asked. “What befell him?”

  A dozen voices related the news. I could make no sense of their words. By shouting louder than they I managed to quiet my informers. I searched for a face I knew and saw Hubert Shillside’s adolescent son. He was a stolid youth, and perhaps lacked imagination. But in this matter I did not seek invention, but fact.

  “William…what has happened here?”

  The crowd was restive, and one or two would have answered for the youth, but I silenced them and bid the lad continue.

  “There was an argument…many heard.” Heads nodded in agreement. “Philip accused Edmund of something.”

  Then it was that I recognized the bloody figure over whom I knelt: Philip, the town baker. And standing before his forge, his arms pinioned to his side, was Edmund, the smith. The smith’s eyes were wide in fright, or amazement, at what he had done. He made no move to escape the grasp of those who clutched his arms.

  “Philip picked up Edmund’s hammer, as he’d laid it down when the dispute began,” William continued. “But he swung wide, not bein’ accustomed to swingin’ hammers. Edmund swung back with a piece of hot iron in his tongs. Philip ducked but the edge caught ’im by the throat…an’ there he lays.”

  “What was their dispute about?” I asked.

  “Dunno,” William offered. “Wasn’t close enough t’hear plain. Just saw when Philip swung the hammer.”

  The matter in dispute was of little importance at the moment. I did not press the matter, but rather concerned myself with Philip’s seeping neck. The man began to moan, but in his mouth I saw no blood. I was relieved. If the stroke had penetrated his throat he must die, for the bleeding would continue no matter what I did for his external wound.

  I kept the sopping apron pressed close against the laceration and wondered when the runner would return with my instruments. The lad arrived soon enough, and I saw from the corner of my eye the mob part to allow him through. Alice had followed, and pressed in behind him.

  I called for a bystander to take my place at the wound while I readied the instruments I would need. The crowd hesitated, and in that moment Alice knelt at my side. “Wha…what must I do?” she stammered.

  “Keep this cloth pressed tight against the wound until I tell you to release it. Then be ready to apply it again should I need it.”

  She nodded understanding and did not hesitate but took the red, sodden apron in both hands and forced it against the cut.

  I opened my kit and prepared needle and thread. As I worked I asked the curious who hovered above me for an egg. A crone lurched wordlessly off down the High Street in response.

  I would have liked to repair the torn vein first but knew of no way to do that without releasing a great flow of blood once again. So with needle and thread in my right hand, I held my left above the wound and told Alice to release the apron.

  When she did, blood flowed again from the torn flesh, but not so much as before. A clot was beginning to form at the edge of the cut.

  I gripped the lips of the wound with the fingers of my left hand. As I did so Philip groaned and twisted in pain. I spoke rather more sharply than I ought, I fear, and told him to be still, else I could not patch his cut. I should be more generous in such situations, but sometimes I lack sympathy for those who need my care because of their own foolishness. Certainly if Philip had not first picked up the hammer he would not now be producing a stream of blood in the street.

  One hand was not enough to close the wound. As I pinched one en
d shut the other opened and poured forth more blood. I needed a third hand. Alice saw my dilemma and provided the extra appendage. She reached red fingers past my hand and pinched the other end of the laceration closed. No words passed between us, but she smiled, then looked back to her work.

  With two sets of fingers closing the wound I could work quickly, and in but a few moments was able to stitch shut the laceration. Alice used her free hand to squeeze blood from the dripping apron, then dabbed at the fresh effusions as I worked.

  The old woman who had set off for an egg returned as I pulled the last suture tight. I broke her egg in a cup from my instrument box and removed the yolk. The albumen I spread over the stitched wound.

  Normally I follow the practice of Henry de Mondeville, who taught that wounds heal best when dry. Therefore I apply few salves to a cut such as Philip received, preferring only to wash the wound in wine. But I thought in this case a poultice might serve, for a few days. I bound Philip’s neck in strips of linen, then assisted him to a sitting position.

  Philip’s eyes wandered and I thought he might swoon. His face was white and his lips pale blue. I had thought to ask some of the gawkers to assist him to his feet and see him down the High Street to his home and bakery on Broad Street. This could not be done. Philip had lost too much blood.

  I sent Will Shillside to the carpenter’s shop for a plank and two poles. When he returned I instructed two men to lift the baker onto the plank, his feet and arms dangling on either side, and with a pole crosswise at each end four spectators bore him home. I told Philip I would visit him on the morrow and that he must rest ’til then.

  As the bearers moved off with Philip I heard another commotion and looked up to see the baker’s wife come panting up to her husband. She had been tardily informed of her husband’s hurt.

  I stood aside while three women competed with one another to tell the lurid details, including some particulars of which I was unaware.

  When they had done I spoke, and told her to see that her husband did not rise from his bed until the morrow, when I would call. The woman nodded understanding, shook flour from her apron, and wordlessly followed her husband toward Broad Street. She took the news well, I thought. Too well, as it happened.

  I turned to Edmund, still standing at his forge. “Release him,” I told his captors, who were holding his arms but loosely anyway.

  “What have you to say of this matter?” I asked the smith. He did not reply, but looked to his feet and with a toe began rearranging clinkers on the floor of his forge.

  “What did you argue about with Philip that came to this?” I pressed, and nodded to the bloodstains soaked now into the dirt of the street but yet visible.

  “Ask Philip,” the smith replied. “’Twas he come to me.”

  “What about?”

  The smith was silent, and went to stirring ashes with a toe again.

  “If he complains of you to the manor court you will be compelled to speak.”

  “He’ll not, I think.”

  “Why? Because he brought the first blow?”

  “Aye…there’s that,” Edmund agreed.

  “And there is more?” I waited, but received no reply.

  I was sure there was more to this tale but could not get it from the smith. I gave up, waved his captors off, and set out for the castle with my instrument box tucked under my arm. Alice was waiting for me at the bridge, gazing down into the brook. Her hands were free of the baker’s blood. She must have washed them in the stream.

  “You did well,” I told her, and joined her at the rail.

  “Will the baker live?” she asked.

  “Aye. Unless he attacks the smith again before his wound heals.”

  “Would ’e ’ave died had you not sewed ’im up?”

  “Probably.”

  Alice was silent for a moment, staring upstream at the mill and its wheel. I was about to suggest that she would be needed at the castle when she spoke.

  “Did you see me brother?”

  “Your brother? Where?”

  “In the crowd, watchin’ as you sewed up the baker.”

  “I paid little attention. Which brother?”

  “Henry.”

  Alice had two half-brothers, born of her father’s first marriage. These two were angered when their father married a second time, fearing loss of patrimony. What they expected to gain from their father, a poor cotter with a quarter yardland and a scrawny pig, I cannot tell.

  Henry, I presume, gained his father’s quarter yardland, the hut, and anything Alice left in it. He is a tenant of the Bishop of Exeter. I am not informed of the business of that manor in the Weald, though the property be but across Mill Street from the castle.

  “I was anxious for Philip,” I said. “I remember Will Shillside looking on, and a few others. I did not notice your brother.”

  “He was at the edge of the crowd. I saw ’im when I came up wi’ the lad you sent t’fetch the box.”

  She looked down at my instrument case. I could not tell where this conversation was going. Perhaps nowhere, for Alice became silent again. I am a patient man. The girl had, I thought, more to say. I listened to the mill wheel creaking as it turned, and to the splash of water through the sluice. We were so still and silent that a small trout ventured out from the shadow of the bridge and positioned itself below us, waiting for the current to bring a meal its way.

  “I saw ’em when I was kneelin’…when you asked for help.”

  “Saw what?”

  “The shoes. I was down close to the ground, like, an’ you notice things down there you don’t when standin’ up.”

  “Your brother’s shoes?” I guessed. I had a feeling I now knew what the girl wanted to say, and why she found it difficult.

  “Aye. Him as hardly ever owned any, as I remember. Least, not like them ’e wore today.”

  “Did he never wear shoes, even in winter?”

  “Oh, aye…but made ’em hisself. Never paid cobbler for shoes.”

  “And what of the shoes he wore today?”

  “Wood soles. Thick, like they was new, an’ leather t’bind ’em to ’is feet. Soft leather, ’twas. Tanned.”

  “Like those missing from the feet of Alan the beadle?”

  Alice nodded her head and gazed back toward the mill. For all the mistreatment she had endured at her brother’s hands, she no doubt felt disloyal for bringing me this report. And, perhaps, apprehensive that her brother might learn of her disclosure.

  The girl remained silent, her eyes on the turning mill wheel but not, I think, seeing it.

  “The blue yarn,” she whispered. “Henry once had a cotehardie of blue. ’Twas old and faded last I saw it.”

  “Threadbare?” I asked.

  “Aye…tattered, like.”

  “So that loose threads might fall from, say, a ragged sleeve?”

  “Aye.”

  “When did you last see your brother wear such a garment?”

  “Before I came t’live in castle, sir. I see little of Henry now, so what he owns I know not, but ’twas before father died I last saw ’im wi’ the old blue cotehardie.”

  “You have performed two good services this day,” I told her. “I will see to this business of your brother’s new shoes and old blue cotehardie. Rest easy. He will not learn how my suspicion was aroused.”

  A look of relief brightened her face.

  “Run back to the castle and explain my absence at dinner to the cook. Ask him to send a meal to my chamber. I will be there straightaway.”

  “Aye, sir,” she chirped, and set off as I directed. I watched with pleasure as she hastened away. Well, there was nothing much else to look at; I had already viewed the mill and stream.

  Chapter 5

  After a cold dinner in my reeking chamber I made my way across Mill Street to the path leading along Shill Brook and the cottages in the Weald. These were the bishop’s tenants. I had not had cause to venture down this lane since I treated Alice’s father, unsucces
sfully, for his broken hip.

  His hut lay in disrepair, the toft overgrown and the door fallen from its leather hinges. Whatever of the man’s possessions his sons thought valuable enough to keep from Alice, this dwelling was not among them.

  I did not know which of the next two huts belonged to Henry atte Bridge. I rapped on the door of the first, which was ajar, and was rewarded for my efforts by the appearance of a disheveled woman of indeterminate age carrying a basin on one hip and a runny-nosed child on the other. Both mother and child appeared to have taken seriously the maxim that winter bathing might cause serious health issues.

  Henry, the woman said, lived in the next hut. She was the wife of his brother, Thomas. The wife of a quarter yardland tenant cannot lead an easy life, I reflected, as I gave her thanks and left her to her pot and child.

  The next dwelling gave a better first impression. The roof was newly thatched, and freshly oiled skins stretched across the windows. I thumped on the door to no result but sore knuckles. In the silence between my assaults on the door I heard distant voices. After a third attempt at the door I gave up and circled the house to the garden toft in the rear.

  A woman was there, spading manure into her vegetable beds. It was her voice I had heard, directing children who were assisting in the work by breaking the clods she turned over. The woman used an iron spade. This surprised me. Most cotters can afford only wooden tools with which to work their land.

  This woman was as robust as her sister-in-law was frail. And also the children appeared well fed. She rested a foot on the shovel and eyed me suspiciously as I approached. The appearance of a lord’s bailiff seems often to create that expression on the faces of the commons.

  “Good day,” I greeted her in my most cordial tone.

  The woman remained silent, as if there was no need to reply if she had no argument about the quality of the day.

  “Is your husband at home?”