The Grim Reaper

by Bernard Knight

  The coroner shook his head. ‘I have a couple of questions for you. You’re always a fount of knowledge when I need it.’

  The senior cleric smiled gently. Painfully thin, his plain black cassock fell loosely about his narrow shoulders. The short, crinkled hair that covered his head was grey, though he was barely a dozen years older than de Wolfe’s forty summers.

  ‘I’ll do what I can, John. I doubt you wish to discuss theology.’

  The coroner’s first question was about the burial of the murdered Jew.

  ‘I’ve heard about the killing,’ replied the Archdeacon. ‘That house belongs to our Chapter. The Treasurer’s clerk was muttering this morning that, as a tenant, the cloth merchant had no right to rent out those rooms.’ He rubbed his long thin nose. ‘I claim no real knowledge of Jewish funeral rites. I expect you know as well as I that they do their utmost to bury their dead before the next nightfall.’

  ‘That’s impossible in this case,’ replied de Wolfe. ‘We’re waiting for the daughter to come from Honiton tomorrow.’

  ‘Is it really impossible?’ answered de Alençon gently. ‘If she has the body taken away, the delay will be even greater. Why not bury it today? There are other Jews in Exeter who would gladly see to the arrangements.’

  ‘The daughter may wish to see her father’s body. And where can we bury him? Surely your Church would not welcome him in one of their grave-pits.’

  De Alençon smiled sadly. ‘Certainly that would be impossible. Unlike some of my brethren, I feel great sympathy for his race, especially since the tragic disgrace in York and other cities, which followed King Richard’s Coronation. But there is now a small plot outside the walls in Southernhay which those of the Hebrew faith have purchased for a cemetery.’

  The coroner chewed this over in his mind. ‘Maybe I’ll do that. Then his daughter can decide later what she wants done with him.’

  De Alençon prompted his friend to ask the other question he had mentioned.

  ‘The same issue, really,’ replied de Wolfe. ‘This old fellow’s murder last night.’ As he related the story of the Gospel quotation he fished in the pouch on his belt and handed over the creased scrap of parchment.

  After de Alençon had studied it, he handed it back and gazed steadily at his friend. ‘You’re wondering who could write and quote the Scriptures, other than a priest?’

  The coroner nodded. ‘As usual, it was your nephew who spotted that straight away. Then Hugh de Relaga suggested that whoever wrote this might be traced by his penmanship. Is that possible?’

  The Archdeacon pursed his lips dubiously. ‘I’ve never considered the matter before, John, but when I was in Winchester years ago, I was in charge of the scriptorium for a while and I could certainly have put a name to the writer of each document from the style in which he used his quill.’ He looked quizzically at de Wolfe.

  ‘But where would you start? There must be over a hundred clerics in Exeter, counting all the canons, vicarschoral and parish priests. Even the young secondaries and some of the choristers can read and write, you know.’

  ‘I doubt we need to consider the juniors in this. You are the Archdeacon of Exeter, so you must know all the parish priests. Are any of them strange or unstable?’

  De Alençon smiled wryly. ‘We have our share of peculiar people in the Church, just as in any other walk of life, but no one that I would consider a potential killer.’

  The coroner waved the parchment at him before he tucked it back into his belt-pouch. ‘What do you read into this, then? Is the perpetrator following some godly command from the Bible that he casts out the moneylender from the temple? And is he likely to go on cleaning up the city, like some holy vigilante?’

  The Archdeacon shrugged. ‘Perhaps he just hates Jews, which is not uncommon now in England.’

  They discussed the affair until the wine jug ran dry and John’s stomach told him it was past time now for the midday meal.

  He left the Archdeacon pondering on potentially wayward priests in his diocese and made his way back the short distance to the house in Martin’s Lane. When he entered his high, sombre hall, Matilda was already well into her dinner, seated at one end of the long oak table that was the main item of furniture in the gloomy chamber. She was ladling more of Mary’s hare stew from an earthenware pot into a wooden bowl, but paused to glower up at her husband as he sat down opposite. ‘You were late, as usual, so I began without you,’ she snapped. Along with religion, eating was Matilda’s main interest in life. Her appetite almost equalled Gwyn’s.

  Mary came in with more bread and a quart of ale for her master, who drew a small knife from his belt and, with the aid of a large spoon carved from a cow’s horn, loaded his own bowl with stew. They ate silently for a few minutes, until John felt obliged to start a conversation, if only to fend off the sulky cloud that he sensed appearing over his wife’s head.

  He told her about the murder of the moneylender that morning, which failed to grab her interest: Matilda classed Jews with Saxons and Celts as beneath the consideration of a Norman lady. Though she had been born in Devon and had spent but a few months of her forty-six years with distant relatives across the Channel, she acted as if she was a high-born Norman in exile in this inferior land. It was a matter of shame to her that even her husband was part Celt, his mother half Welsh and half Cornish.

  However, when John came to the part of the story about the Gospel text, Matilda’s ears pricked up, for Church business was her favourite subject. Suddenly he remembered that she had a compendious knowledge of Exeter’s clergy, which might be useful to him. ‘The Archdeacon agrees with me, that the most likely culprit is a priest. Can you think of any cleric in the city who might be evil enough to do this?’

  He had phrased his question badly, for she bridled at his words. ‘Indeed, I do not! They are almost all devout and righteous men – some are saints.’ She was incensed that her irreligious husband should cast such aspersions on her heroes.

  Then her tone became a little less harsh. ‘Admittedly, there are some priests whose characters leave something to be desired. A few are fond of drink or women – though those failings are shared by most men,’ she added sarcastically. ‘But a murderer among our clergy? Never!’

  But her husband sensed she was not as emphatic as her words implied and persisted in his question. ‘But who among them might have some hidden vice, do you think?’

  Flattered against her better judgement to be asked for her opinion about her beloved priests, she twisted her square face into a grimace of concentration. ‘Well, Robert Cheever of St Petroc is certainly too fond of the wine cask. He has been helped to his lodgings more than once after falling in the street,’ she answered grudgingly. ‘And Peter Tyler of St Bartholomew’s lives in sin with that old hag who cleans the church. What he sees in her is beyond my comprehension.’ Warming to her theme she dipped deeper into the vat of gossip, filled by her cronies at St Olave’s. ‘I did hear tell, though there’s no proof, that Ranulph Burnell of Holy Trinity was overly fond of the young choristers at the cathedral.’

  She threw down her spoon with a clatter. ‘But that’s no reason to suspect any of them of being a killer. Maybe you and the Archdeacon would be better employed in looking among some of the canons and their vicars down in the Close – there’s some odd characters there, God knows.’

  Matilda glared at her husband and threw a final jibe at him, which echoed her brother’s remark earlier that day.

  ‘And if you are really seeking a weird priest, why look further than that perverted clerk of yours!’

  There was a silence while Mary cleared the bowls and set down a dish of raisins imported from France. When she left, with a sly wink at John from beyond her mistress’s back, he once again pulled out the piece of parchment from his purse and showed it to his wife, still hoping to coax her away from her threatened black mood. ‘This was left with the corpse.’

  She studied it, although like her husband she was unable to read it, as
only one person in a hundred was literate. He explained the translation that Thomas had given him, that it was an apt quotation from the Gospel according to St Mark. ‘You don’t need to tell me, I know the passage well,’ she snapped, but she held the scrap of palimpsest reverently for a moment, then handed it back.

  ‘It may be possible to match the handwriting with whoever scribed it,’ he observed. ‘Only a priest would think of a trick like this and have the ability to write it.’

  Grudgingly, she agreed. ‘One of the law clerks or my brother’s scribes could write the words but probably only a cleric would know the text.’ Now hooked on the mystery, Matilda had a new thought. ‘That’s obviously a copy made from a Gospel, isn’t it?’

  Her husband stared at her, not understanding.

  ‘Yes, there’s blank space above and below it, nothing else,’ he said. ‘It’s not an actual leaf from a Bible.’

  ‘Then it must have been penned by a priest,’ she brayed triumphantly. ‘An unholy layman might have torn the page from a Vulgate, but a priest would revere the Holy Book too much to desecrate it. And he would know that copies of the Gospel are precious and expensive. He must have copied the passage out, even at the risk of having his script recognised.’

  De Wolfe grunted his acceptance of her reasoning, though as he had assumed all along that the culprit was in Holy Orders, her assurance took him no further in identifying the villain. After a few more minutes of profitless discussion, Matilda abruptly pushed back her stool and announced that she was retiring to her solar for her customary nap before attending Vespers at St Olave’s.

  After she had stumped off to command Lucille to prepare her for her rest, John took his pot of ale to one of the cowled monk’s chairs set alongside the hearth. Though the house was of timber, he had had this great stone fireplace, copied from one at a manor in France, constructed against the back wall. It was his pride and joy. Its tapering chimney rose up to the roof-beams to carry out the choking smoke that used to fill the chamber from the old fire-pit in the centre of the floor.

  With his hound squatting alongside him to have his ears fondled, de Wolfe sat quietly until he judged that his wife would be snoring in their solar. Then, with a low whistle to Brutus, he left the hall, picked up a grey surcoat in the vestibule and let himself out into the lane. Taking the same route that he and Gwyn had followed at dawn, he went into the cathedral Close and strode along the rubbish-strewn paths between the grave-pits. Brutus loped hither and thither, sniffing at each pile of refuse and cocking his leg against every bush until they came through Bear Gate into the busy market street where the old Jew had died.

  De Wolfe ignored the scene of the crime and dived into the lanes opposite, which led steeply down towards the river, where the West Gate and Water Gate lay. The alleys were crowded with the usual throng of porters carrying bales of wool, men pushing carts and barrows loaded with goods. Traders shouted the merits of their wares from their stalls, and hawkers pushed trays of sweetmeats, pies and trinkets under his nose. Beggars rattled coins in their bowls at him and cripples and blind men held out hands hopefully for alms.

  As he went down the slope, the houses improved somewhat as the lane became Priest Street,fn1 where most of the parish priests and many of the vicars and secondaries lodged. As he passed the narrow dwellings, John wondered if somewhere within them lurked a cleric of a murderous nature.

  A short distance into the ecclesiastical ghetto, he turned right into Idle Lane, a short track leading across to the junction of Stepcote Hill and Smythen Street, where the smiths and metal-workers had their shops and forges. The lane’s name came from the bare plot left by a fire some years ago, which had not yet been rebuilt. Only the Bush Inn had survived: its stone walls had resisted the fire that had engulfed its timber-built neighbours.

  As he neared the tavern, de Wolfe’s loping stride slowed and Brutus was now well ahead. De Wolfe, a tiger of the Crusades and a warrior afraid of no man, was fearful at the prospect of facing his former mistress, the landlady of the Bush. After falling out with her more than a month ago, he had avoided the tavern until now, but the thought of Nesta’s sweet face – and an admitted ache in his loins – had helped him screw up enough courage to visit what had been almost his home-from-home. Yet as his dragging feet took him ever more slowly along the few yards of Idle Lane, he felt the unfamiliar signs of panic as he imagined a sharp confrontation with the comely Welsh woman. He stopped fifty paces from the inn and looked anxiously at it, as if he might be able to see through the walls and gauge what sort of reception he might have. The Bush was square, with a high steep thatch that came down almost to head height. At the front there was a pair of windows, one to each side of the door, and along the wall nearest to him was a hitching rail for patrons’ horses, which ran back to a gate into the yard behind. Here the kitchen shed, the brew-house and the wash-hut shared a dusty patch with the privy.

  For a moment, he considered sneaking in through the back door to spy out the situation, but then his pride got the upper hand. With a muttered oath at his own foolishness, he strode to the heavy oak front door, over which hung a large bundle of twigs to indicate the tavern’s name to its illiterate patrons.

  With his dog at his heels, he ducked under the lintel and went inside. Immediately, nostalgia overtook him as he savoured the eye-smarting atmosphere of woodsmoke, spilt ale, stale sweat and cooking. When his eyes adjusted to the haze and the dim light from the shuttered windows, he saw that there were only a dozen or so people in the single big room: it was mid-afternoon and still quiet.

  The murmur of conversation dropped as he walked to his favourite bench near the empty hearth. Heads turned, then drooped away to whisper to each other. The coroner’s liaison with the inn-keeper was common knowledge, as was their recent rift, and his sudden reappearance was good fodder for gossip, but the other customers were careful not to whisper too loudly. They knew that the short-tempered knight was quite capable of cuffing the head of anyone he suspected of making personal remarks about him.

  He dropped down on to the bench with Brutus against his knees under the rough table. Almost immediately, a clay pot containing a quart of ale was banged down on the scrubbed boards. ‘Good to see you again, Cap’n,’ wheezed the old potman, his one good eye swivelling independently of the horrible whiteness of the other, which had been speared, years before, at the battle of Wexford. De Wolfe had been in the same Irish campaign and old Edwin had great respect for him. De Wolfe grunted at him, though he was fond of the aged rascal, who was often a useful source of news.

  ‘You’re the only serving man here, these days, I hope?’ he rasped.

  Edwin grinned back, tapping the side of his pockmarked nose. ‘She’s not taken on any more young men from Dorset, that’s for sure. Learnt her lesson, I reckon.’ He looked furtively towards the back of the smoky room as he hissed the words.

  ‘Where is she, then?’ De Wolfe asked, gruffly to hide his unease.

  ‘Upstairs, Cap’n. She spends a mortal lot of time in bed these days – on her own, though!’ he added, with a leer, then limped away, his twisted leg another legacy of his days as a man-at-arms in Strongbow’s army. John sat supping the ale, which was widely acknowledged to be the best in Exeter, thanks to Nesta’s prowess in brewing. He turned on his bench to survey the room, half relieved that the auburn-haired landlady was not yet in sight. Most of the other drinkers, the majority of whom he knew well, were studiously avoiding his gaze, though one or two caught his eye and gave a nod.

  As usual, there were a few strangers too, mostly merchants and craftsmen passing through the city. In a far corner, a few clustered around a table in the company of a couple of whores, who used the inns to pick up their clients. In a community of only a few thousand people, de Wolfe knew most of the harlots by sight, but one was new to him. She was a handsome, if somewhat raddled, girl of about twenty, noticeable because of her bright red wig, her low-cut scarlet kirtle, and the boldly striped hood of her green cloak, the trademar
k of a Southwark whore. He wondered why she was plying her trade so far from London. Still, he had had no need of strumpets since he had returned from the wars three years ago and his interest in her was merely passing curiosity.

  His eyes moved to the back of the low chamber, where Edwin was drawing off ale and cider from a row of casks wedged up along the rear wall. Near him was a wide ladder that led to the upper floor beneath the roof. The sight of it triggered his nostalgia again. How many times had he climbed it, following Nesta to her tiny room, partitioned off from the open sleeping floor where the overnight guests rented a penny mattress? He had spent so many pleasant afternoons up there – and a few nights when he could arrange an alibi. He had even bought his mistress a fine French bed, a luxury indeed in a time when most folk slept on a palliasse on the floor.

  The time went on, and de Wolfe was on his third jug of ale. There was still no sign of Nesta and soon his bladder complained of the quantity he had drunk. Rising, he went out through the back door and relieved himself against the rickety fence beyond the wash-house. On his return, he stopped alongside Edwin, who was pouring ale slops from a leather bucket back into one of the casks. ‘No sign of the mistress, then? Does she often stay abed this long?’

  ‘No telling what she’ll do these days, Crowner. She’s lost some of her spirit, I reckon, since that young bastard ran off with her money. She leaves much of the running of the tavern to the two wenches and myself.’

  John rumbled in his throat, a sound that might have meant almost anything. ‘I’ll just finish my jar, then be off.’ He decided he would stay until he heard the distant cathedral bell ring out for Vespers.

  ‘Shall I tell her you were seeking her?’

  De Wolfe shook his head, his face grim. ‘If she’s not down in a few minutes, forget I was here,’ he said. When he slumped back on to his bench, even Brutus seemed to gaze up at him forlornly.

  A few feet above his head, the landlady of the Bush was oblivious of his presence below her. She lay on the French bed in her shift, having pulled off her working gown and linen coif so that her mane of dark red hair flowed over the folded sheepskin that did service as a pillow.