The Boy-Bishop's Glovemaker

by Michael Jecks

  He knocked back the last of his mazer of wine and wiped at his lips with the back of his hand. The merchants of any city were a corrupt set of pirates, out to steal whatever they could from anyone with less money and fewer opportunities to protect themselves, but the men here had surprised Sir Thomas with their avarice and brutality. It didn’t matter to him particularly if another man should die in order that he should survive the richer, but he was amazed that merchants should decide whether a man should live or die purely upon the basis of a potential benefit to them. It was unpleasant, an inversion of legitimate behaviour. It was one thing to travel abroad and fight Frenchmen or Moors, taking their wealth, but doing the same with Englishmen seemed wrong.

  As he sat mulling over the black thoughts that chased themselves around his head, he noticed a figure standing near the fire. It was him again: Vincent le Berwe. The two men caught each other’s eye and Sir Thomas nodded slightly. His paymaster acknowledged him with a slow smile, nervous that someone else might witness it.

  Before Sir Thomas could go over and speak to his client, he saw a cowering shadow slip through the doorway. ‘Hob! Over here, lad!’ he growled.

  ‘Master, I have seen him,’ Hob said expectantly. His face was like that of a dog, Sir Thomas thought, a dog whipped daily but still eager to be welcomed.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At the Cathedral. He was going there alone, Master.’

  ‘Good,’ Sir Thomas muttered. He rose. At the door, while Hob waited patiently, a vacuous smile on his face, Sir Thomas considered his options. It was always dangerous to go to the Cathedral, but he must question Karvinel. A bell tolled and Sir Thomas glanced up. It was the signal for Mass – which meant Karvinel’s woman would be alone. Smiling grimly, he set off to Karvinel’s house, Hob scampering at his side like a hound out for a walk.

  It was one of the reasons why Sir Thomas had been prepared to allow Hob to remain with him, this happy-go-lucky attitude. He never moaned, never tried to blame others for things, and provided he was occasionally praised he remained content. It took little to please him. If it hadn’t been for Jen, Sir Thomas would not have considered keeping Hob at his side, but Jen made it clear that the price for her body was that her brother should also be looked after. Sir Thomas had thought to point out to her that she was already his, and should he decide to rid himself of her half-witted brother, there was little she could do to stop him, but he knew that the threat was empty. He enjoyed Jen as a willing bed-mate, and if her fee was board and lodging for Hob, Sir Thomas was happy to accept.

  It was strange how some lads were born without the brain of a dormouse, he reflected. Perhaps it was the horror of seeing his mother’s body which had addled the boy’s brains. Sir Thomas had heard such things could happen. However, the idle thought drifted from him as he approached the house of Nicholas Karvinel.

  ‘Wait here, Hob,’ he said, and knocked loudly upon the door.

  He had expected a stout doorkeeper, but to his faint surprise there was no answer for a long period and then a young urchin opened it. ‘Yes?’

  Sir Thomas blinked. ‘Who are you?’

  The boy glared. ‘Servant to Master Karvinel.’

  Sir Thomas smiled. ‘In that case, is your lady in the house?’

  ‘Who is it?’ came Juliana’s voice. She was in the hall and Sir Thomas walked past the boy along the screens passage. Entering the hall itself, he found himself in a smallish, slightly shabby room. A fire smouldered meanly on the hearth, two benches were ranged against the walls, a moth-eaten tapestry hung on one wall and a table was strewn with poor wooden bowls and plates.

  On a chair by the table was Juliana Karvinel, drinking from a jug of wine. Seeing him, she stood and gave him a disconcerted smile. ‘Sir?’

  ‘My Lady,’ he said gruffly, bowing low. ‘I am Sir Thomas of Exmouth, Knight Bachelor. My apologies for following you here, but I saw you at the Christmas Mass and I was ravished. I had to find out where you lived.’

  She gaped. It was easy to see that she was at once flattered and worried. ‘You . . . you saw me?’

  ‘And you saw me, my Lady.’

  ‘No, no, I am sure I . . .’

  ‘Why don’t you send the boy away and we can talk?’

  She met his suggestion with a simper and a half-duck of her head, then bawled for the boy and sent him off to the tavern until he should be called for.

  Returning to meet Sir Thomas’s smile she motioned with a hand towards the door at the back of the hall.

  ‘Why not?’ he said. He allowed her to lead the way. ‘It is very quiet and that boy said he was your servant – are all your servants away?’

  ‘If you mean “have they been sent away”, I only wish they had been! No,’ she said disdainfully. ‘My husband has failed in business and this necessitates the loss of all our servants. Surely you have heard about his evil luck? He has lost almost everything in failed ventures and thefts, and now we must make ends meet as best we can. Although,’ she added confidentially, ‘I don’t know that I can stand it much more. Not only has he taken away my maid and my small pleasures, now he seems to have gone mad. He tells me that he can renew our fortunes. I tell you, I begin to doubt whether he is sane.’

  ‘A merchant can hardly succeed without his servants. Where would he be without his staff: his bottler, his gardener, his steward? Without them he would be a poor kind of a host or companion to other merchants. And what would he do without his clerk?’ Sir Thomas paused as if studying the poor tapestry at the wall.

  ‘It is shoddy, isn’t it?’ she said, standing at his side and sneering up at it. ‘I am afraid it was the best we could afford after the last of the robberies here and the fire.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and smiled. ‘It must have been terrible for you.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She smiled and stood very close at his side.

  It took him only a moment to reach an arm out to her, and he felt her shiver deliciously as he pulled her towards him. But she froze when she felt his dagger’s point beneath her chin.

  Henry blinked with concern as he stood before the serious-faced knight and his friend, but his fear was not based upon the two men before him; his concern was focused on the figure whom he knew was standing behind him: the Succentor.

  ‘I know that Adam has accused Luke of trying to poison him and it’s not true,’ he asserted.

  Baldwin had an easy manner with children. Simon often found it annoying that while he was careful to behave with suitable, as he saw it, distant authority to children, they often responded far better to his friend Baldwin’s solemnly respectful manner. It appeared to be working yet again right now. While Gervase hovered in the background, scowling viciously at the back of Henry’s head and Simon tried to maintain a diffident aloofness, the child met Baldwin’s gaze with a quiet conviction as he told what had happened the previous night, how Adam had assaulted Luke and left Henry to take the blame.

  Luke was near to bursting with fury as he heard what Adam had done ‘You mean he attacked me? I thought it might be him at our meal today but when he was poisoned I forgot it. If only the poison had killed him!’

  Baldwin nodded. ‘I can understand your thinking, although at present he may wish the same, after being forced to be sick and then having a bladder squirt something revolting up his arse. I don’t know about you, but having all that happen in front of his Canon can hardly make him feel good.’

  Luke and Henry exchanged a quick look. They were by no means allies, but there was a mutual satisfaction in knowing that Adam had suffered. It mitigated the bullying they had endured at the older youth’s hands. Luke frowned briefly, glancing at Gervase, thinking of how Henry had been thrashed the previous evening. Henry saw his look and grinned. Both had been beaten worse by Canons and others.

  Baldwin continued, ‘We must still discover where the poison came from.’

  Simon looked at Luke. ‘The bread Adam ate was not the loaf which he stole from you?’

  ‘No. It was a new
one. The one I had was older – it had dried with age.’ Luke hesitated, then said, ‘I got that loaf from Peter, sir, the night that he collapsed.’

  ‘Did you eat any of it?’ Gervase asked.

  ‘No, sir. I was going to last night, but Adam stole it before I—’

  ‘So he wasn’t poisoned by eating the same one which Peter ate,’ Gervase said.

  ‘We don’t know that,’ Simon pointed out. ‘He may have eaten it before going into the meal.’

  ‘But what then of the bottle?’ Gervase asked.

  Another thought had struck Simon. ‘Tell me – when you eat, is the bread brought in later with the meats, or is it served on the table already when you arrive?’

  ‘Oh, it’s already there.’

  ‘So anyone could have gone in and poisoned the bread, knowing who would eat it,’ Simon said with a look at Baldwin.

  Baldwin stood staring thoughtfully at the ground. ‘And the killer left the pot behind to implicate someone else in the room.’

  ‘One thing is certain, Adam was not poisoned by that orpiment. It is too bright. No, he was poisoned with something else.’

  ‘Yes. Gervase, could you tell us when this pot would have gone missing?’

  ‘I noticed it was missing last night,’ Henry said. ‘I thought Luke had taken it. He often takes different colours for his pictures.’ He hesitated, realised that his words sounded snide, and added, ‘He is the best at drawing and painting among us all.’

  Baldwin smiled gently. It was clear to him that there was a considerable amount of rivalry between the two boys, but he was also sure that Henry was offering an olive branch.

  ‘Who has access to the Choristers’ hall?’ Baldwin asked the Succentor.

  ‘Everyone. Adam to change the candles, another to sweep and clean, the Choristers, me . . . If you want the truth, I suppose anyone who came to the Cathedral could drop in here,’ Gervase said.

  ‘And the Canon’s house – I suppose the same is true there?’

  ‘Provided the poisoner went there when all was quiet, yes.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Nicholas Karvinel had been about to go straight home, and although he didn’t know it, his death would certainly have been hastened had he done so, for he would have walked in upon Sir Thomas with his wife.

  Instead, Karvinel was delayed as he left the Cathedral. In the High Street he bumped into Coroner Roger and the City Bailiff, both standing angrily glaring up and down the road.

  ‘Coroner? Are you all right?’

  ‘No, I’m damn well not!’

  ‘What on earth is the trouble?’

  ‘That bastard Vincent. Do you know where he is?’

  ‘He usually attends an earlier Mass. He’s in around the middle of the day, so no, I fear I have no idea where he is – unless he’s in the Guildhall or his home.’

  ‘No, I’ve checked both,’ Roger spat. ‘The bastard could almost be deliberately avoiding me. And so he bloody should!’

  Karvinel’s confused expression made the Coroner relent a little. ‘Vincent apparently got his son to try to ruin Ralph.’ He explained what Jolinde had told him. ‘I want to talk to him.’

  ‘Ralph’s death seems to become more confusing by the day,’ Karvinel said.

  ‘Well, not for much longer. I intend clearing up the whole sorry mess.’

  ‘Good.’

  Roger was about to walk off when a thought struck him. ‘Tell me – cordwain and basan: Ralph bought some a short while before he died – I witnessed the deal – but it has disappeared from Ralph’s shop. Do you know anything about it?’

  Karvinel felt his heart stop in his chest. ‘Ralph’s shop? Why no, no one has offered me anything like that,’ he said. ‘When was it taken?’

  It was a short while later that he suddenly realised what had happened: Vincent’s cart had been seen by Peter outside Ralph’s shop only a short time before the discovery of the glover’s body. Only with difficulty could he stop himself bursting into delighted laughter.

  Simon was staring at the grass as he walked a short distance behind Baldwin towards the Fissand Gate. ‘I don’t understand what is going on here at all,’ he said at last. ‘I thought we had a case of Peter’s poisoning, and that he died because of someone inside the Cathedral, yet now it seems it could have been anyone.’

  ‘It is not so complicated as it may appear, I think. No, not by any means. You have to bear in mind the sort of people we are dealing with. There are the city folk and the Cathedral, and the two don’t mix very easily. The city respects the Cathedral and is grateful for the money the Cathedral spends in the city, but does not truly like the Dean and Chapter. They are an alien race to the secular people who live outside the Close.’

  ‘But we have an appallingly tangled mess here.’

  ‘Perhaps – yet the more tangled this knot appears now, the more I am convinced that a small tug at the right point will unravel the whole thing.’

  ‘Two men dead; a third almost killed and two boys who have cause to hate him; outlaws attacking merchants . . . I don’t see how matters could get much worse.’

  Baldwin gave him a sideways look. ‘Are you happy that Jolinde was innocent of the murders?’

  ‘I suppose so, since he admitted to buying the bread and meat with which Peter was poisoned.’

  ‘If he was. We have no proof that Peter was poisoned with the bread or meat. In fact, we have a lot of evidence that he wasn’t. Jolinde and Claricia said that they ate the food Jolinde had brought, which seems odd. And still more odd, if someone wanted to kill Peter, why should they poison food which Jolinde was buying?’

  ‘Why someone should want to kill Peter at all is still a mystery to me,’ Simon grunted.

  ‘What if the murderer intended killing another?’

  ‘Like whom?’

  ‘Jolinde, for instance.’

  Simon stopped, frowning. ‘It would make sense.’

  ‘More than that, it would be logical. If you wish to poison a man, you poison the food he is buying. You don’t assume he’ll give it away to someone else.’

  ‘True. Yet the poisoner might have known that the food was to be eaten by Peter.’

  ‘It is possible, but what if that wasn’t known? Then we are left with the opposite perspective.’

  Simon waited but his friend remained silent and the Bailiff was reluctant to break into his thoughts as they returned to the house where Adam lay recovering.

  ‘Has he confessed?’ Stephen asked.

  Simon shook his head as he entered. He wasn’t even certain whom Stephen was asking about: Luke or Jolinde.

  Adam lay on a palliasse on the floor, a rolled robe was his pillow and he was covered with a pair of thick blankets, although his shivering seemed to show they were doing him little good. Stephen had taken on himself the responsibility of nursing the boy and sat on a stool near his head. To aid Adam’s recovery, he had set a large crucifix on a table nearby, so that Adam could see it by turning his head.

  Stephen had recovered greatly and now he could look upon the two law officials with a certain asperity. ‘What is it? This poor fellow needs to rest. He was almost killed.’

  Baldwin took in the room with a glance. ‘We wish to ask him some questions,’ he said. ‘First, we understand you took a loaf from Luke last night. Is that correct?’

  Adam glanced up at Stephen, but the Canon was telling his beads through his fingers and didn’t meet his look. ‘Yes, sir. I took it, but I didn’t touch it. He dropped it in some muck, and I threw it away.’

  ‘You didn’t eat any of it?’

  ‘No. Why should I? It had shit on it.’

  ‘What does this matter?’ Stephen asked.

  ‘Jolinde gave food to Peter. The bread was given to Luke by Peter. It is possible that the bread was poisoned.’

  Adam blenched. ‘But I could have eaten it!’

  ‘Perhaps it would have been justice if you had,’ Baldwin stated unsympathetically. ‘Did you have a bo
ttle of orpiment with you today?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A bottle was found on the floor afterwards. It wasn’t yours?’

  ‘No.’

  Stephen stirred. ‘It could have been Luke’s.’

  Baldwin looked at him kindly. ‘No. I am convinced that he had nothing to do with this. I believe that while you and the Chapter were in the Cathedral someone went to your house and put poison on Adam’s bread, leaving the orpiment behind to make it appear that Luke or someone else in the room had tried to kill him. Anyone could have got in.’

  Stephen sighed. ‘Oh, thank God!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I had been convinced that my nephew had done this.’

  Baldwin’s eyebrows rose. ‘Nephew? Earlier you told us about your brother . . .?’

  ‘I was the second son of Sir Ranulf Soth of Exmouth. My brother Thomas took the manor and I came here. When my brother’s wife died and he became an outlaw, I agreed to look after his son. That boy is Luke.’

  ‘And you thought that his father’s evil disposition could have led to his trying to poison Adam?’

  ‘I had heard that Adam had waylaid him last evening, yes, and thought my brother’s violent nature had been repeated in Luke. It wouldn’t have been the first time such things have happened.’

  ‘Well you may relax in the knowledge that Luke is most certainly innocent.’

  ‘And Jolinde took food to Peter?’ Stephen said. ‘I saw him once with something under his robe in the Cathedral. That must have been what it was. Bread and meat for his friend.’

  ‘You mean Luke is really Sir Thomas’s son?’ Adam cried suddenly.

  ‘Be quiet and try to rest,’ Stephen said.

  ‘Then it must have been Sir Thomas who tried to kill me! He wanted revenge for what I’d done to his son!’

  ‘Was he here today?’ Simon shot out.

  Stephen wouldn’t meet his eyes. ‘I refuse to believe that my brother would have poisoned someone in my house. He is many things, but he would not risk harming me. And he would be more likely to use a dagger or sword – an honourable weapon. Not poison.’