Hugh Corbett 14 - The Magician's Death

by Paul Doherty

  ‘Are you sure, King’s man?’

  ‘Oh I’m certain. You had the motive and you had the means, your husband’s arbalest.’

  ‘I am Mistress Feyner, not some soldier.’

  ‘True,’ Corbett agreed, ‘you are Mistress Feyner the laundrywoman; who would suspect you? You moved amongst those young women like a pike amongst carp, choosing your victim. You could listen to all the chatter, who was going where, what they had planned, where they would meet. You also have some status in this castle. You could lure a wench here or there to lonely spots, like midden heaps or outhouses.’

  Mistress Feyner sat like a woman in a dead faint, head down, hands resting in her lap.

  ‘You have a covered cart inside the castle walls, full of dirty washing or baskets of clean linen for Master Reginald. You can move that cart around the castle on any pretext, such as collecting laundry or exercising the horses. Who gives Mistress Feyner a second glance? Who senses the murderous anger seething within you? Yes, Mistress Feyner?’ She did not look up. ‘I don’t know how you lured the other victims, but as for Rebecca, well, you heard about her plans to visit her friend’s grave in the cemetery of St Peter’s in the Wood. You offered both Rebecca and Alusia a ride in the cart. On that particular morning, a cold December day, with the light hardly broken, Rebecca came first and you were waiting for her with the arbalest loaded. She hadn’t even collected her cloak. She died in an instant, and you wrapped her corpse in a canvas cloth and lifted it easily into the cart where it would lie well hidden. I’m sure when we inspect the cart we will find traces of your murderous work. Alusia arrives, and of course Rebecca isn’t there. You become impatient and leave. No one stops you, no one thinks that Mistress Feyner is an assassin, whilst your horses really pull a death cart. You reach St Peter’s church, Alusia steps down and hurries off. You go to the tail of the cart, let down the flap, pull out the canvas-bound corpse, unroll it and leave it by the side of the trackway. Only for a few heartbeats are you vulnerable or exposed, then you are gone.’

  ‘I could have been seen.’ Mistress Feyner’s voice was gratingly harsh.

  ‘Seen? By whom? I’ve been along that trackway, it is too close for any of the outlaws to come. You can see back down the path and ahead, whilst the cemetery wall would hide you from Father Matthew locked away in his house behind the church. You have claimed one more victim but now you are wary. King’s men have arrived in Corfe. I take a vow, at the time rashly, to hunt the killer down. You may have decided to pause for a while until I was gone, but Alusia was dangerous. She may have seen or heard something as she went into the cemetery. Perhaps she may have wondered why neither of you saw the corpse on your way down to the church. You knew she would never leave the castle. However, because of the chatter, you knew of her friendship with Martin. Alusia was nervous, stretched like a bowstring. Did you give her some false message from Martin to meet him here or there, some lonely spot? If things went wrong, you could always allege you made a mistake or were misled. On that night you were waiting for her, perhaps in the usual lovers’ tryst, that ruined passageway leading down to the old dungeons. You killed Alusia, wrapped her body up and hid it. But you made one mistake.’

  Corbett picked the wire brush from the sack beside him and held it under Mistress Feyner’s nose.

  ‘The dead don’t just stand and watch, woman; they sometimes help. You made a mistake, one of your brushes was found on Alusia’s corpse. Why should she have that? She never worked in the laundry room.’

  Mistress Feyner lifted her head and smiled sweetly.

  ‘Sir, how clever you are.’ The smile faded. ‘How clever you are,’ she repeated. ‘I really don’t know what was wrong with my Phillipa. Sometimes I thought she was with child, but if she was,’ the woman chatted on, ‘she would have told me, wouldn’t she? Sharp as a pin she was, King’s man. Oh, she had her ways, her dreams and madcap tales. She listened too intently to Lady Constance’s stories about mysterious knights, yet she was as bright as a button, my Phillipa, sharp as a dagger. Like her father she was, yes, he fought with a crossbow but he was also a skilled carpenter; he could carve out of wood and make such shapely things. Father Matthew complimented her. She understood a little Latin and French and he was teaching her to read from the lectern in church, and that was the problem. Those harridans were jealous of her! Harassed her, bullied her.

  ‘On Harvest Sunday last, during Mass, I could see their spiteful glances, laughing behind their fingers. Phillipa, all pale, left the church, saying she felt sick. I never saw her again. Sir Edward was kind, a search was made, but I knew my Phillipa.’ Mistress Feyner tapped her breast. ‘Here, in the sanctuary of my heart, I knew something had happened. The weeks passed, Phillipa never returned, I accepted she was dead and grieved silently. I heard the tales, the gossip, about that skulker who calls himself a man-at-arms.’ Mistress Feyner was looking at a point above Corbett’s head, letting her heart gush out the hatred which curdled there. ‘That horde of bitches never grieved, not a tear fell over Phillipa, no one ever comforted me, no one ever grieved. I knew they were guilty. I held them responsible.’

  She glanced at Corbett and blinked.

  ‘In the end it was so easy. My husband’s arbalest was clean and oiled. I had three quivers of quarrels; I vowed to use them well. I began with those who gossiped and sneered the most; they came like flies to the honey pot. So stupid, so easily trapped. Rebecca, sidling up beside the cart when it was in the outhouse as I was loading Master Reginald’s linen. All concerned she was about visiting her friend’s grave. False tears in her eyes, stupid mouth pulled down in grief. Grief?’ Mistress Feyner spat the word out, talking to Corbett as if he was a fellow conspirator. ‘Grief? She had never once asked about Phillipa, my daughter who had no grave. I killed her so easily in that darkened place.’ She paused, nodding to herself. ‘You’re right. The cart is high, it’s so easy to hide a corpse.’ She laughed sharply. ‘She wanted to visit her friend; I thought, well, why not join her? As for Alusia,’ she shrugged, ‘she may have seen something so I pretended Martin wished to see her near the ruined doorway. It’s a pity he didn’t come. I judged him guilty as well.’

  ‘You left her there?’ Corbett asked.

  ‘Oh yes. The next morning, before dawn, I decided to exercise the horses. No one gave me a second glance, why should they bother about me? They didn’t even care to make a proper search for my daughter. It was a dark morning, the mist curling. I carted the corpse down to the marsh.’ She sighed. ‘I thought it would sink, but I don’t really care. Phillipa has been found, she’s back, and as for you, sir . . .’

  Mistress Feyner got to her feet, stretching out her hands as if she expected them to be bound. Corbett, surprised, sat back in the chair and the laundrywoman moved as swiftly as a cat. She picked up the iron poker from the hearth, swinging it, aiming for Corbett’s head. He threw himself forward, head down, and the iron bar whirled above him. He moved to grab Mistress Feyner but she had already dropped her weapon and was running for the door.

  ‘Ranulf!’

  Mistress Feyner swung the door open and Corbett followed in pursuit, only to realise Ranulf wasn’t there, but at the foot of the steps. He came pounding up, alarmed by the noise and the crash of the door. Mistress Feyner turned right, fleeing further up the spiral staircase. Corbett and Ranulf followed. The steps were steep, twisting sharply as they followed the line of the wall. Corbett felt a little dizzy whilst Mistress Feyner, light on her feet, raced ahead. On the storey above she stopped to send some wood, stacked in a window embrasure, rattling down, impeding Corbett’s progress. He and Ranulf kicked the obstacle aside, and by the time they glimpsed her again she had reached the top, bursting through the door on the roof of the tower. She tried to bolt it from the outside, but in her haste was unable to draw across the rusting iron. Corbett paused, gasping for breath, his sweat-soaked hand slipping down the mildewed wall. The reek of this ancient place made him cough and splutter on the dust swirling through the
air.

  ‘I want her alive, Ranulf.’ He put his hand on the latch. ‘There is no place for her to flee. I want to know why she attacked me.’

  They opened the door to be buffeted by the icy wind. Mistress Feyner had reached the battlements and stood with her back to one of the crenellated openings. She seemed all composed, a smile on her lips. Corbett edged gingerly across the hard-packed ice.

  ‘Surrender!’ he called out. ‘Give yourself up to the King’s justice.’ He beckoned with his hand as he moved forward.

  Mistress Feyner climbed up into the gap, holding the stone either side, bracing herself against the wind which sent her hair and gown billowing.

  ‘Please,’ Corbett begged, ‘there will be mercy as well as justice.’

  ‘What does it matter, King’s man?’ Mistress Feyner called back. ‘What does anything really matter now?’ And spreading her arms as if they were wings, she fell back.

  Corbett and Ranulf, slipping on the ice, strode across. Steadying themselves against the battlements, they peered over. Mistress Feyner lay below, black and twisted against the snow. Already a dark puddle shrouded her head like some sombre nimbus. People were hurrying across, shouting at each other.

  ‘God have mercy on her,’ Corbett whispered. ‘God give her peace.’

  They went back down the steep stairwell. Corbett stopped to secure his chamber before continuing down into the yard. Sir Edmund and Bolingbroke were already waiting.

  ‘I told them what had happened,’ Ranulf whispered. ‘Sir Edmund went looking for further proof.’ Corbett stared down at the bundle at the Constable’s feet: a dark-stained sheet, an arbalest polished and clean, next to it a leather pouch of crossbow bolts.

  ‘We found them,’ Sir Edmund declared. ‘The crossbow was in a hole beneath her cottage floor. The cloth was folded neatly in the cart. So evil.’ He turned and spat.

  ‘No,’ Corbett disagreed. ‘A poor woman, driven witless by grief, revenge and hatred. Anyway,’ he gazed up at the snow-laden sky, ‘this bloody work is finished; we have other things to do.’ He patted the Constable on the shoulder. ‘Give her body an honourable burial. She sinned but truly believed she had been grievously sinned against.’

  Already a crowd was beginning to gather, eager with questions; Sir Edmund waved them away whilst Corbett took his two companions up to his chamber. For a short while he sat hunched in front of the fire, warming himself, wondering if he could have done things differently. Mistress Feyner had killed, and killed again. The castle folk would have demanded justice and she would have received little mercy, being thrust in some dungeon then tried before the justices in eyre, before being dragged on a hurdle at a horse’s tail to be hanged on some gibbet or, even worse, burnt alive outside the castle gate.

  Ranulf brought Corbett some watered wine. He sipped it carefully, calming his mind.

  ‘We will not meet de Craon today. So, let us draft the pardon letters for the outlaws.’

  The two clerks muttered in protest, but when Chanson arrived they began the laborious process. Sheaths of vellum were smoothed with pumice stone. Corbett dictated the words, Ranulf and Bolingbroke writing them down before copying them into formal letters, dating them on the eve of St Nicholas, the thirty-first year in the reign of Edward the First after the Conquest. The hard red wax was melted, Bolingbroke carefully ladling it out on to the prepared parchments. Corbett opened the secret Chancery box and carefully made sure his own ciphers were there before taking out the precious seal and making the impressions. Certain places in the document were left blank to insert names of individuals, but they all read the same, ‘that X be admitted, with full pardon and mercy, into the King’s peace, and that this pardon was for divers crime, poaching, housebreaking, robbing the King’s highway . . .’

  ‘I must go,’ Ranulf declared. ‘I promised I would meet them, to assure Horehound and all his followers that all would be well. I also offered to bring supplies.’

  When Ranulf had left, taking Chanson with him, Corbett replaced the secret Chancery box and, trying to forget that black figure, head soaked in blood, sprawled out in the snow, took out the Secretus Secretorum of Friar Roger and began leafing through the pages. He found it difficult to concentrate. Despite what justice would have been meted out to her he regretted Mistress Feyner’s death; even more that he had failed to question her about the murderous assault on himself.

  Corbett eventually composed himself and became engaged in a fierce debate with Bolingbroke over the value of the Secretus Secretorum and the cipher Friar Roger had used. The more he studied the strange Latin words, the more convinced he became that the Franciscan had invented a most cunning code. He and Bolingbroke tried every variation they knew, and Corbett had to check himself lest he inadvertently gave away his own ciphers used in the letters and memoranda issued to his agents across Europe. They tried position codes, code wheels and the most complex multiplication table codes, studying the vertical pattern with the letters forward or backward. Bolingbroke confessed to being almost certain that Friar Roger’s cipher was based on one of these. Corbett, however, remained unconvinced and kept returning to the key Magister Thibault had found on the last page, ‘Dabo tibi portas multas’ – ‘I shall give you many doors’. He realised how the letters of this phrase were separated, transposed and confused by blocks of other letters which somehow gave the words a Latin ring, and isolated what he called these alien obstacles, but when he applied them to other lines and sections of the manuscript it failed to resolve the mystery. He and Bolingbroke must have argued for an age, and when Ranulf returned drenched in melting snow, Corbett welcomed the break.

  ‘Yes, I met Horehound and his lieutenant Milkwort. They have agreed to come into the castle the day after tomorrow and accept the King’s peace. Strange,’ Ranulf sat on a stool to remove his boots, ‘they were full of mumbles about the taverner Master Reginald, who drove them away, whilst Father Matthew was ill, claiming he was too weak to congratulate them on the good news. Sir Hugh?’ He glanced across. Corbett had been half listening, staring intently at the copy of the Opus Tertium de Craon had lent him. He placed this on the bed and went to get his own copy, one finger on the text comparing the two pages.

  ‘I’ve found it,’ he whispered and glanced up. ‘At least I know that!’

  There are two methods of gaining knowledge: reasoning and experience.

  Roger Bacon, Opus Maius

  Chapter 10

  Magister Jean Vervins wrapped his cloak about him and leaned against the parapet of Corfe Castle, oblivious to the bitter cold and the freezing wind tugging at his cowl. The walkway was slippery underfoot but Vervins wasn’t frightened. In his youth he had served on a cog of war and had trod dangerous slippery decks which moved and twisted on heavy seas. He turned to his right; he was safe enough up here. Ten paces away a sentry crouched against the crenellated wall, warming his hands over the small brazier. He caught Vervins’ gaze and lifted his hand; the Frenchman replied and turned to stare out across the mist-shrouded countryside. Vervins had climbed the steps leading up to the parapet walk resting on his cane, quite determined to escape the cloying atmosphere of Monsieur de Craon. He did not like the royal clerk; he resented his arrogance and above all was deeply opposed to this farrago of nonsense. He wanted to be back in Paris, to be closeted in his own warm chamber at the back of his spacious house on the Rue St-Sulpice. He wanted to return to his books and ledgers, to walk the narrow streets and meet his friends in the cookshops and taverns, or be back disputing terms of law in the cavernous schools of the Sorbonne.

  Vervins had studied Friar Roger and dismissed the dead Franciscan as a dreamer and a boaster. He recalled Friar Roger’s statement from the Opus Minus: ‘there is no pestilence to equal the opinion of the vulgar. The vulgar are blind and wicked, they are the obstacle and enemy of all progress.’ How could a follower of St Francis, a self proclaimed scholar, be so dismissive of others? Why all this secrecy? He recalled how Friar Roger had expressly said he had not seen
a machine that could fly, yet added, ‘but I know the wise man who has invented such a procedure’. How could he say that? What did it mean? Vervins leaned against the stonework, absentmindedly picking at the lichen and moss growing there. He liked nothing better than to visit the small squares of Paris where troops of travelling mummers and storytellers would set up their makeshift stages and recount legends and stories to astonish the crowd. Was that the case with Friar Roger? A man who hinted at wondrous things but never produced the truth? The English clerks were just as baffled as he over the cipher of the Secretus Secretorum. Was that just mummery cloaked in scholarship? Was there a cipher, or was it a cruel trick by Friar Roger? A way of taunting and teasing other scholars, cleverly hinting that this manuscript contained revelations which would explain the wonders described in his other writings?

  Vervins stared along the parapet walk. He was tempted to take off the thick wool-lined gauntlets and warm his fingers over that fire, yet he desperately wanted to be alone. The Secretus Secretorum was one thing, but there were more pressing, dangerous problems; the deaths of his two colleagues had reduced him to a state of constant agitation. Of course, he had to accept the evidence of his own eyes. Destaples had died of a seizure, the door to his bedchamber locked and bolted, whilst Magister Crotoy had slipped down steep steps and broken his neck. How else could it be explained? There was no trickery there, surely? But why had they been brought here, plucked from their beloved studies, forced to endure a sickening sea voyage and the rigours of an English winter in a lonely castle?

  Vervins returned to staring out at the countryside. The fields and hedges slept under their carpet of snow, and now and again the mist would shift to reveal the distant trees. From below he heard the sounds of the castle, and beyond the walls the distant cawing of ravens and rooks. He came up here to be alone; everywhere he turned there was smirking de Craon, or the French clerk’s silent and grim-faced bodyguard Bogo de Baiocis.