The Butcher of St Peter's: (Knights Templar 19)

by Michael Jecks

  ‘What, even at night?’ he asked, frankly scandalized. It was a key element of the city’s defences that the gates should remain locked at night.

  ‘Three hard, two soft. If he hears that, he knows it’s us or one of our clients,’ she agreed lightly, but her expression didn’t relax. Usually to see his face register such alarm would make her laugh, but not tonight. Even while discussing the curfew, her eyes were fixed on the group of older buildings ahead.

  The brothel was a scruffy old house, and although it was not the sort of place Ralph would want to live in, it was good enough for its job. Once it had been simply a large barn-like hall, open to the roof, with a large area where the women entertained their guests. Now it had been built up inside, so that there were a number of small chambers, with more on a second floor. Each had a palliasse or a cheap bed, except for a few rooms which possessed a decent wooden one with a rope mattress.

  Betsy did not take him upstairs to one of those better rooms. Instead she took him through the screens passage and out to the yard at the back, where there were some storage rooms leaning against the main block. These were the rooms which had given the building its nickname of ‘the stews’.

  Built along the rear of the main hall, these rooms were bathhouses, equipped with immense barrels. Men and women could sit in them and have warmed water tipped over them. To help them clean themselves, Betsy had collected quantities of fat and lye here, and she manufactured soap when she had spare time. Ralph considered he might want to have a bath with her later, but then scotched the idea. It was already late enough, and he didn’t have time to wait for the water to be heated.

  ‘She’s in here,’ Betsy said with an anxious softness.

  It was one of the storage rooms, and as soon as Ralph’s eyes had adjusted to the dimness and he saw Anne’s face, he wanted to recoil and leave the room. ‘Sweet Jesus! This is a task for a seamstress, not a physician!’

  ‘What can you do for her?’

  ‘Sweet Christ,’ he said to himself. ‘Can I do anything?’

  He was professional. Untying the draw-strings at the neck of his bag, he sat on the bed to study her wounds. They had been inflicted with a knife, that much was certain. The scars at her brow and cheeks showed that much. Her nose was a blackened scab in which the air whistled like a demon’s breath. ‘Maid, you poor love,’ he said quietly. He had some ointments with him, arnica and lavender for bruises and scrapes, but this was more extreme than anything he had anticipated.

  Still, she was his patient. He set to work, calling for warmed water and cloths, then stripping her and studying each of her wounds while she lay back, sobbing quietly, the sound muffled by the scabs at her nostrils and mouth. When he saw the punctures on her breasts, he felt sickened. This was no chastisement or revenge for favours poorly provided, such as he was used to seeing on the whores down here, this was a deliberate assault designed to ruin the girl. There could be no justification for this sacrilegious destruction of one of God’s creatures.

  When he was finished, he brewed a mess of leaves in a pot. ‘This is a draught to help her sleep, Betsy,’ he said. ‘It’s a stupefactive, a dangerous drink, called dwale. It contains hemlock and poppy seed, and it is treacherous in any quantity, so only let her have a small cupful at a time. No more, you hear me? It will let her sleep, and just now uninterrupted sleep with no dreams will do her much more good than anything else.’

  He glanced back into the room and saw Anne’s eyes on him. Smiling, he tried to give her a feeling of comfort. ‘Let the poor child sleep, dear God,’ he begged. For his part, he could not imagine that the girl could wish to live with such dreadful scars. ‘And for God’s sake, do not let anyone near her with a mirror,’ he added as he closed the door.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Baldwin was already contemplating his bed when he heard the door open. He smiled with relief to see his wife. ‘I was beginning to grow anxious lest you were in danger.’

  ‘No, not with Edgar at my side,’ she said calmly.

  ‘Did you learn anything about the widow?’

  Jeanne sent for wine before attempting to collect her thoughts. The walk back in the gloom of early evening had unsettled her more than she wanted to think. And the story was all a little too close to her own concerns. So she sat and considered until the wine arrived, and when it did, she drank deeply and studied her husband awhile before beginning.

  ‘The woman is called Kate, Simon of Bristol’s widow. She lived a few doors from the house where Daniel and his woman lived for so long. Apparently Juliana and he were married at the height of the famine, and at the time Juliana’s family was rich. But her father died, and their savings went not very far at a time when prices kept rising. All their wealth was bound up in the merchant business the father had created, and with the famine there was no market for their expensive spices and fripperies. There was no profit for them. Their money was quickly used up and the family fell into poverty. Their house on Correstrete was sold off, but during the famine prices were very low, and that helped them only very little. The mother died, and the sister, Agnes, lived with Juliana and Daniel.

  ‘Juliana and Daniel always struck the people of the parish as being a happy enough couple. He was a very stern enforcer of the law, and she was a proud woman who never forgot that she had been born to money, so they had few friends in the neighbourhood, but that tended to make them more close, so people thought. And then there were rumours that Juliana was lonely. As Daniel’s job grew more demanding, so apparently she grew more desirous of attention. In the end she started seeing a man.’

  ‘Was this speculation, or malicious gossip, rather than actual observed fact?’ Baldwin asked.

  She looked at him seriously. ‘Husband, you know full well that when a servant in your household makes eyes at a maid, it’s all over the place. He would only have to have been seen once.’

  Edgar grinned. ‘The household usually knows before the wench.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jeanne continued. ‘There can be no secrets in a frankpledge. The only one who didn’t know in that area was probably Daniel himself, because no one thought it was their business to tell him what his wife was doing while he was away.’

  ‘If there was such certainty about it, who was this mysterious lover? I presume he has a name?’ Baldwin said.

  ‘That was the part that struck her neighbours as particularly disloyal. It was the man who had bought her family house. Taking him as a lover seemed especially treacherous since it was he who had partly helped to impoverish her own family.’

  ‘I can understand that some would think that wrong, although surely the fact that she was carrying on an adulterous affair was worse than the matter of the man with whom she conducted it?’ Baldwin asked.

  ‘There was one more fact. The man himself is called Jordan le Bolle. People about here think that he is involved in unsavoury businesses, especially prostitution. Juliana’s husband was trying to gather evidence to have him arrested.’

  ‘That’s not necessarily a crime,’ Baldwin noted. ‘Most of the bishops in the country own houses which are run as brothels.’

  ‘There are stories that he’s been involved in other businesses too. Most people do not want to cross him, because he can be dreadfully violent when the mood takes him. Baldwin, I got the impression that he could kill. The woman was very fearful of telling me any of this, and did not want to be overheard. I only hope she is not in danger herself now.’

  ‘Within her own district she should be safe,’ Baldwin said, but now he was frowning as he considered the points which Jeanne had learned. ‘Edgar, what would you say of her?’

  ‘Lady Jeanne was quite right. The woman was nervous, but so angry that she was determined to tell the truth and hang the devil who tried to stop her.’

  Jeanne nodded. ‘And she was not alone in her anger. The men in the room also seemed bitter about the way in which the woman has taken a lover and then used him to kill her husband.’

  ‘That is what
they believe?’ Baldwin said.

  ‘Some of them, yes. They seem convinced that the woman was determined to enjoy her new lover and had him murder her husband so that no one would stop her doing so.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Baldwin mused. He walked to a chair and sat down, staring intently into the distance as though trying to piece together the story by an effort of will.

  Jeanne shivered. There was something unnatural and foul about this. Ever since hearing Juliana had been unfaithful, she had been aware of a leaden, almost sickly tension in her belly. It was as though there was some evil news about to be imparted, except it was not a premonition, rather a sudden realization.

  It was the row she had had with Baldwin just before he came here to Exeter, a while after he had returned from his pilgrimage. At the time the argument had seemed so petty and pathetic that Jeanne had been certain it had been some failing of hers that had led to it. She had made a joke about his interest in a young, dark-haired maid on their estates, and he had irritably denied any such interest. From that spark had risen the flames of distrust which now flickered at her heart.

  Until today, Jeanne had only considered her comments foolish, thinking that her words had upset him, as though she thought him faithless. That accusation had upset him so much that he had actually lost some of his love for her, she thought.

  But now, having heard the story of Juliana and her lover, she had another possibility in the forefront of her mind: that she had pierced the target with her first shot. He had been unfaithful to her, and was no longer in love with her. He could act his affection well enough, but there was something different about him. She was sure of it.

  And that reasoning had left her feeling crushed.

  The Dean was happier the next day. Two messages had been sent, and both should assist matters significantly. One would inform my Lord Bishop Walter of the problems, with a subtly conveyed warning that the Despensers could be involved somehow in the dispute, while the other was a letter which hopefully would bring some more assistance.

  When Thomas had told him of Gervase’s visit to the stews, he had been tempted to demand that Gervase came to see him immediately, and then accuse him of going to a brothel and either losing his money there or paying it to the whores, but a moment’s reflection made him reconsider.

  Gervase de Brent was here on business, selling wine from a cargo at Topsham, and had dropped into the close one evening saying that he had nowhere to sleep the night, and could he beg a room rather than trying to find a perch in one of the tattier inns about the city? The Dean’s hospitaller had given him a quick look over, and deemed him safe enough to have inside the cathedral, but that very night he claimed to have been robbed.

  Now that the Dean considered the sequence of events, it seemed curious that the death of Sir William of Hatherleigh should have occurred at just the time that the robbery was discovered. Not that there was any possibility of the friars’ murdering the old knight, no. But the fact that his death had happened just then was serendipitous from the friars’ point of view. Having a robbery from the cathedral, and then a member of the chapter assaulting a friar within their own chapel, implied a rather unpleasing lack of Christian spirit. If a man were to suggest that the Dean couldn’t keep control of his chapter, these two instances might seem to corroborate the allegation.

  Which made the Dean think again. The man had been dying for some weeks, apparently. Would it have been beyond the wit of the priory to find a man who could ask to stay in the cathedral lodgings overnight, who could then accuse the cathedral of theft? It wouldn’t have to be at the same time as the death of Sir William. Yet there was something that troubled him still.

  Friar John had implied that the King himself might come to hear the case. If that were so, what matter? The Bishop was a good comrade of the King’s – only the Despensers themselves were closer to him. Only the Despensers.

  Hugh Despenser the Elder and Hugh Despenser the Younger, father and son, two men steeped in greed, unequalled in rapacity or dishonour, yet they were the closest advisers allowed access to the King. The Dean knew that the King was thought to be the catamite of Hugh Despenser the Younger. The Bishop had intimated as much, and apparently the Queen was distraught and miserable to have lost the love of her husband – especially to a sodomite. It was the final indignity for the poor Frenchwoman.

  Alfred was aware of the lusts of the flesh, but he would have nothing to do with such behaviour. From all his learning, he believed that God detested those guilty of the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah. Be he never so high, God would wreak ruin upon him.

  But that was by the by. If the friar believed that the priory could persuade the King to come here to Exeter, that implied that they had a lever which would work in their favour – access to an adviser still more senior than the good Bishop Walter. And there were only two men who could possibly provide greater access or more influence than him.

  Dean Alfred sighed and rubbed his temples.

  There were only the two possibilities. Either Gervase was a genuine merchant who had been robbed here in the close, or a spy sent here to bring shame to the cathedral. He was to announce the theft, then raise a loud outcry against the cathedral’s chapter, embarrassing them just when they were on the defensive because of one hothead who had rushed into the friars’ chapel and stolen a body. The fact that he did so because the friars were seeking to evade their duties by keeping him and holding his funeral in there – admittedly in accordance with the dead man’s wishes – would help no one. The fact that in so doing the friars were knowingly stealing money which was rightly the cathedral’s was no help either.

  No, there could be nothing better suited to cause embarrassment to the cathedral. And then the friars could demand compensation – perhaps the right to bury in their chapel, with retention of all estates? There were so many possibilities that Alfred could only sit and speculate, his head whirling.

  Yes. Gervase must be in the pay of the Despensers. A spy set to harm the cathedral because of that dispute many years ago. It was ridiculous, but it had come back to haunt them.

  Jeanne slept very poorly that night. She had convinced herself that her husband was no longer in love with her. His affection must be feigned; he had fallen for that peasant.

  Her first thought was, she must evict the wench. If the raven-haired slut thought she could bed the lord of the manor with impunity, right under the Lady Jeanne’s nose, she was mistaken. Jeanne would see her suffer for such a betrayal.

  And then, late into the night, as she lay beside her gently snoring husband, listening to the softer breath of Edgar down by the door, she began to wonder whether she wasn’t being entirely unreasonable anyway. The one to blame, surely, was her husband, not the poor peasant girl. It was her man who had selected her out of all the women on the estate … why had he taken any of them? Had Jeanne lost all her charms with the passing of the years? She had only been known to her husband for four years – they were only married two years ago. Could she have shrivelled so swiftly? Her flesh was as soft, surely, as when they first met. Or was it her shrewish ways? She hadn’t thought that she had been too nagging. He would have said, wouldn’t he, if he had grown weary of her chatter? Kinder to tell her, rather than go to seek a substitute for his bed.

  But men were not the same as their wives. They expected diversion and fresh excitement, the thrill of a new body in their arms. Women had told her this. Before her first marriage, her aunt tried to explain.

  ‘They are not like us. We are those who build the nests; we create a home for our man to come back to, so that he wants to return. If he doesn’t, it is our fault, not his. You have to entice him to keep him. He will stray. All men do, but if you are true to him, he will keep you and cleave to you.’

  At the time Jeanne had been so in love with Ralph de Liddinstone, she had laughed in her aunt’s face. It was easy to think differently then, because although her aunt was born in Bordeaux and had educated and raised Jeanne in that English town
, still there were many aspects of Jeanne’s life which were very typical of Devon, while her aunt was more of a Frenchwoman in outlook. Jeanne could not believe that an Englishman, especially a knight, could behave in so dishonourable a way with his wife.

  With time, that innocence had been worn away. Ralph was a good husband at first, but then, when he discovered, so he thought, that the woman he had married was in fact barren, he took to beating her, and taking any of the women on their lands whom he fancied. Not that there was ever a rumour that any of them got with child; and not that the lack of bastards was ever enough to make him apologize or admit that perhaps the failing was on his part, not hers. He couldn’t accept that his cods could be unfruitful. Any problem must be on her side.

  Perhaps that was the meaning of chivalry, in the end. Knights were men, when all was said and done, and chivalry was a code to protect men in warfare. All too often women were nothing more than spoils of war in that code. If a man bested or killed another knight, the widow was his to be treated as he wished. Perhaps she had been stupid to think that her husband was any better than all the other vain, belligerent men who wore armour.

  But he was different. She knew that only too well. He had shown that in a number of ways. He was kind, gentle, loving, perhaps a little easily confused and swayed by a pretty woman … and so back to the first thought: she must evict that peasant.

  There was no rest for her all through the long watches of the night, and she saw the dawn rise feeling unrefreshed and tired.

  Baldwin appeared uncomfortable on waking. He took a little weak cider and some bread, but was clearly in some pain with his shoulder. In her snappish mood, Jeanne’s first thought was that he could get help from the raven-haired peasant, but her waspish mood was tempered when she saw him hiss and wince as he pulled on a thick fustian jupon. He struggled with it for some minutes before casting it away and calling for a linen shirt instead, swinging his arm back and forth, his left hand on his shoulder as though it could ease the pain.