The Grim Reaper

by Bernard Knight

  There was silence while the experts critically regarded the calloused skin of Matthew’s flat feet.

  ‘They look clear to me,’ muttered Brother Rufus at length.

  ‘The man’s been hardening them off for weeks, by the looks of it,’ objected the sheriff.

  ‘There’s no law against that,’ retorted de Wolfe, always ready to contradict his brother-in-law.

  In fact, since electing to undergo the Ordeal, rather than a trial by jury, Bezil had spent a month in running the streets barefoot, had passed hours chafing his soles against a rough flagstone and rubbing in a concoction of oak-galls and tannin. As a result, the skin was twice as thick as normal and of the consistency of old leather.

  ‘That’s not legal, having feet like that,’ howled Nicholas Trove. ‘He should have undergone a different Ordeal – like that of water or molten lead.’

  ‘He was given the Nine Ploughshares at the court, so that’s what he got,’ growled de Wolfe.’ You can’t change the rules now, if they don’t suit you.’

  It was obvious, even to the sceptical sheriff and the outraged complainant, that Matthew’s feet bore not a trace of burns – though perhaps Stigand’s bucket of water had delayed the appearance of redness that was usually inevitable, even if scorching and blistering failed to appear.

  De Wolfe called out to his clerk, who had squatted in readiness before an empty cask, on which he had spread his writing materials. Thomas had a ferocious scowl on his pinched face and his lips were moving in some soundless litany, unrelated to the events around him.

  ‘Record that Matthew Bezil underwent the Ordeal of ploughshares and his innocence caused his feet to reject the hot iron,’ he said, trying to conceal his cynicism.

  Thomas scratched away with his quill, still muttering under his breath.

  For a moment, John’s mind wandered from the Ordeal to wonder why his clerk was acting so oddly these days, but then he recovered himself. ‘Record also that Nicholas Trove falsely appealed the said Matthew Bezil in accusing him of the theft of a sword and is therefore amerced in the sum of two marks.’

  The armourer howled in protest that he had not only lost his sword but now had to pay its value as a fine. Though the coroner felt some sympathy for him, he used the fiasco to promote his cause of encouraging the use of the king’s courts – and to further irritate his brother.

  ‘If the matter had been heard before the judges next week, you might have had a different result,’ he snapped at the ironmonger.

  Still protesting, Nicholas was pushed towards the doorway by Gabriel and stumbled out, shaking his fist at Matthew, who cheerfully made an obscene gesture at him. He had put on his shoes and was trying not to show that his feet were smarting with a growing pain that would be far worse by the time he had hobbled into the nearest ale-house to celebrate his escape – if burns had appeared on his soles for the witnesses to see, he would have been hanged that week for the theft of something that was worth more than twelve pence, which constituted a felony.

  An hour later, John went to the stable opposite his house and climbed on to the back of Odin, his destrier. He had called at home to tell Matilda that he would be away for the night and was relieved to find that she was at St Olave’s for noon service. Mary had fed him a meat pie, cheese and half a loaf, while Andrew the farrier saddled Odin, ready for the journey.

  De Wolfe walked the stallion through the crowded high street to the Carfoix crossing, where he had arranged to meet the others, and the quartet, which included the manor reeve from Sidbury, made their way down South Gate Street, past the bloody mayhem of the Shambles, then the Serge Market to the gate. Beyond the city walls, the crowds vanished and they kept up a brisk trot along Magdalen Street, past the gallows, which today was deserted although a rotting corpse hung in an iron frame from a nearby post. They continued on the main highway eastwards, which was the road to Lyme and eventually Southampton and Winchester.

  As usual, Thomas lagged behind, jerking awkwardly on the side-saddle of his reluctant pony, his features looking as if he expected to hear the Last Trump at any moment. The reeve, Thomas Tirel by name, pulled alongside the coroner to offer more details of what had happened in his village.

  ‘This was a lad of thirteen, Crowner, the fifth son of one of our villeins. His father offered him to work in the mill as part of the family’s manor service, and he had been there almost a year, carrying sacks and cleaning the floor.’

  ‘This is the lord’s mill, I presume?’

  ‘Indeed it is. Everyone is obliged to have their flour ground there and the fee goes to the bishop.’

  De Wolfe was aware that the small village of Sidbury was one of the many manors that belonged to Henry Marshal, Bishop of Exeter.

  ‘So what happened to the boy?’

  ‘He fell through the floor, which was rotten, and was caught in the pinion of the mill-wheel shaft. His head was crushed, poor lad.’

  John failed to visualise exactly what the reeve meant. ‘I’ll have to see the place for myself,’ he growled. ‘But what about this rotten floor?’

  ‘Many a time the miller complained to the Bishop’s bailiff that it was unsafe, but he was unwilling to stop the mill while new joists and boards were laid – he said the expense was unnecessary.’

  The aggrieved tone of the man’s voice suggested to de Wolfe that this was a source of discontent in the village.

  Sidbury was about fifteen miles from Exeter and they reached it in less than three hours’ easy riding. Thomas Tirel took them straight to the mill, a wooden structure astride a brook that ran underneath it. Upstream there was a deep pool formed by an earthen dam, and a crude sluice-gate controlled the flow to the wheel.

  A rumbling noise came from the mill and John saw a cloud of dust drifting from an open door at the side. ‘They are still grinding corn?’ he demanded.

  ‘The bailiff insisted. The gear was not broken, so he had the blood washed away and told the miller to carry on.’

  ‘So where’s the body?’

  ‘Taken to the church, poor boy. We couldn’t give it back to the mother in the state it was in.’

  With Gwyn at his side and Thomas de Peyne trailing behind, de Wolfe followed the reeve into the mill, coughing at the cloud of dust and chaff that filled the atmosphere. In the single room, a large circular stone, four feet across and a hand’s breadth thick, was slowly revolving below a similar but stationary wheel resting on top. A large wooden hopper fed grain into a hole in the centre of the upper stone and a circular tray around the moving lower quern collected the flour that dribbled from the joint between the stones.

  The miller, a large, perspiring man dressed in a thin smock and a hessian apron, was adjusting the flow of grain from the hopper. Because of the noise, he was unaware of their presence until the reeve tapped his shoulder. Almost guiltily, the man turned around and, on seeing the coroner, tugged at his ginger forelock, which was almost white with dust.

  ‘Turn it off!’ yelled Gwyn, pointing at the stones.

  The miller nodded and gestured at a young boy, who was up on a platform tipping a sack of grain into the hopper. Without a word, he ran out like a frightened rabbit and Gwyn, peering around the door, saw him racing up the bank of the stream.

  ‘He has to close the sluice to stop the wheel. That’s why we took so long to free the lad yesterday,’ explained the miller, looking uneasily from the reeve to the coroner.

  A few moments later, the rumbling beneath slowed, then stopped. The silence was almost as oppressive as the grinding judder had been.

  ‘There’s where the floor gave way, Crowner,’ explained Tirel, pointing down at a series of loose boards laid across half of the floor on one side of the millstones. De Wolfe stamped experimentally with his heel on the planks where he was standing. The edge of his riding boot made indentations in the soft surface of the timber.

  ‘This whole place is decaying, for Christ’s sake!’ he exclaimed. ‘How old is it?’

  ‘My father was th
e miller here – and his father before him. It was here in their day, that’s all I know,’ said the ginger man defensively.

  At the reeve’s demand, the miller took them outside and down the grassy bank towards where the stream gushed out from under the building. He opened a low, rickety door and led them into a cramped chamber below the millstones. Looking up, de Wolfe could see a splintered hole a few feet across, with a length of rotten joist hanging loose. To his left was the now silent water-wheel, eight feet high, with a shaft like a small tree-trunk lying horizontally at his feet. This ended in a stout wooden wheel with projecting pegs which interlocked with similar pegs studded around a larger wheel at the base of the vertical shaft, which went up to drive the millstone.

  ‘The poor little devil was caught in those gears, Crowner,’ explained Tirel. ‘Tore his throat open, it did. Blood everywhere by the time we got down here.’

  ‘It stopped the wheel for a moment, the gears being jammed,’ added the miller, with morbid relish. ‘But then the pressure of water built up behind the wheel and it broke two of the pegs off, throwing his head aside – but by then he must have been dead. Had to make two new pegs this morning to get the mill going again.’

  John peered more closely at the crude gearing. In spite of vigorous washing, part of the flat gearwheel and some of the pegs were ominously ruddy-brown. Straightening up, he made for the door, leaving Gwyn to squint inquisitively at the machinery.

  ‘How much does the Bishop get for milling?’ de Wolfe demanded.

  ‘A ha’penny for five bushels, sir. Everyone in the manor must have their corn ground here, they’ve no choice. Anyone found using a hand quern is amerced at the manor court.’

  This was usual: the lord had the monopoly of milling and guarded it jealously as a steady source of income. De Wolfe thought angrily of the mother mourning her youngest son, and determined to have some strong words with the bailiff – or even Henry Marshal himself. ‘Then the Bishop can spend a little of his profit on a new floor – though he needs a whole new mill, before it collapses into the brook,’ he said acidly.

  A few hours later de Wolfe held an inquest, after Gwyn had rounded up enough men and boys from Sidbury and the neighbouring village of Harcombe, to form a jury. The proceedings were held in the graveyard of the old Saxon church, after John and the jurymen had solemnly inspected the mangled remains of the miller’s boy. Although he had seen countless corpses on a score of battlefields and had been present at a legion of hangings, beheadings, castrations and mutilations, de Wolfe was affected by the sight of the weeping mother and distraught father standing at the edge of the small crowd in the churchyard. There was little he could do for them other than offer some gruff words of sympathy after he had passed the inevitable verdict of accidental death.

  He could have declared the gears of the mill ‘deodand’, as many coroners would have done in those circumstances. This meant confiscation of the object that had caused the death, either for the King’s treasury or sometimes as recompense to a widow for the loss of her breadwinner. In this case, it was physically impossible to remove the gears to sell them, as could have been done with a lethal dagger or even a runaway horse. As the boy was a fifth son and of tender years, his monetary value to the family was very small – he shrewdly guessed that the offer of a mark or two for the boy’s life would be more of an insult than a gain to the family.

  Instead, he took the opportunity to berate the bailiff publicly for allowing the mill to fall into such a dangerous state of dilapidation. The man, a pompous, self-important fellow, blustered that he was not responsible for spending the Bishop’s money, but was soon deflated by the coroner’s tongue-lashing and threats to consider attaching him to the forthcoming Eyre on a charge of manslaughter by negligence.

  When the inquest was over, with the sun dropping over the trees, Gwyn raised the matter of a night’s lodging. ‘After the mouthful you gave the bailiff, he’ll not be too co-operative in finding somewhere for us to stay,’ he said. ‘If we left now and put on a good pace all the way we might just get back to Exeter before the curfew.’

  But de Wolfe had other plans. ‘We’ll keep clear of that puffed-up braggart, and clear out of this damned village. Sidmouth’s only a couple of miles away at the coast. We’ll find an inn there and go back to Exeter in the morning.’ He was happy to pay for a penny meal and a mattress for his officer and clerk in the small fishing port down the road, but with luck, he hoped to find a softer, warmer bed for himself.

  The sun was low in the sky when they reached Sidmouth. A single street went down to the strand, where a line of fishing boats was drawn up across the pebble bank. A score of huts built of cob and turf spread out from a nucleus of larger wooden houses and a few stone ones around the church. There were three mean ale-houses, full of fishermen, and two better inns that offered a sleeping place in their lofts.

  After seeing to their horses in the yard of the bigger tavern, which had an old anchor hanging over the door, the trio settled in the smoky, sweaty tap-room to eat and drink. The food was more notable for its quantity than quality, which suited Gwyn’s vast appetite, but even Thomas, after a day on a bouncing pony, managed to do justice to his grilled herrings, onions and cabbage.

  De Wolfe ate well enough, although his mind was on other things. After eating his fill, he left the table and announced that he was going for a walk along the beach to watch the sunset – an intention that raised the eyebrows of both his henchmen, as he was not noted for his aesthetic sensibilities.

  Ignoring their quizzical stares – and rejecting Gwyn’s mischievous offer to walk with him – John grabbed his cloak and went out into the twilight. The sun was a deep red ball vanishing below the distant hills and the sea was a leaden sheet stretching out to a darkening horizon, but de Wolfe had no eyes for this kind of natural beauty, his mind on a different sort of pleasure.

  He walked purposefully up the main street for a hundred paces, then turned into a side lane beyond the other tavern. A few yards further on, he stopped at a house with a stone lower storey, the upper part being timber. He knocked firmly on the heavy door and, with a twinge of annoyance at his own vanity, found himself running fingers through his thick black hair to brush it off his face.

  The door opened a crack and an old man’s face appeared in the shadows, looking fearful at a knock on the door at dusk. John’s features slumped into a scowl at this sudden pricking of his pleasant expectations. ‘Is not the Goodwife Godfin at home?’ he demanded brusquely.

  ‘Who seeks her at this time of the evening?’ the old man demanded querulously.

  ‘A friend – Sir John de Wolfe from Exeter.’

  ‘She has left here these four months, sir. I rent the dwelling in her place.’ De Wolfe cursed under his breath. His devious plans had obviously gone well astray. ‘Where is she now? Still in the village?’

  ‘She has married and gone away. To a butcher in Bridport.’

  There was nothing more to be said and, with muttered thanks, de Wolfe stalked away, tight-lipped in his disappointment. The damned woman was not only twenty-five miles away but now had a new husband, so that chapter in his life was closed for good. He had chanced to meet Brigit Godfin at a fair two years ago, when he had come here with his partner Hugh de Relaga to buy breeding sheep. She was a dark, attractive woman of thirty-two, recently widowed from a cloth merchant in Sidmouth. He was soon sharing her bed and although his visits from Exeter were difficult to arrange, except at infrequent intervals, he had managed to keep the affair going until he took up the coroner’s appointment. Since then, pressure of work and his increasing involvement with Nesta had caused him to neglect Brigit – he had not seen her for more than six months. Now she had found other fish to fry and he could draw a line under what had been a pleasant, if desultory affair.

  He marched back to the Anchor, dropped back on to the bench he had left and glared at Gwyn as if daring him to enquire where he had been.

  ‘Another couple of quarts, then it’s t
ime to sleep,’ he muttered. ‘We must be on the road to Exeter first thing in the morning.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In which Crowner John takes his wife to a banquet

  On the way back to the city next day, Odin cast a shoe and de Wolfe spent the rest of the morning with Andrew the farrier, restoring the big warhorse to working condition, before he reluctantly crossed the lane to his house.

  The midday meal was silent as usual, with Matilda sulking over her husband’s absence the previous night. As they sat at each end of the long table in their hall, the two yards between them might as well have been two miles, for all the social intercourse that took place.

  His head bent over Mary’s mutton stew and fresh bread, John pondered the events in Sidmouth and was thankful that Matilda was unaware of this amorous fiasco. She had mocked him unmercifully when she learned of his rift with Nesta and had long sneered at his ill-concealed fondness for his youthful sweetheart in Dawlish, so he was greatly relieved to know that the Brigit Godfin episode had been entirely outside her knowledge.

  The thought of Dawlish crept into his mind now, as he turned over the diminishing choices in his love-life. With Brigit gone and Nesta apparently resolute in her rejection of him, the beautiful Hilda was his only remaining option. The thought of her warmed him, her glorious blonde hair and her lissom body flooding into his mind as they had with increasing frequency over the past few weeks.

  He had been deprived of her company for too long, he decided. His last attempt to call at Dawlish had been frustrated by an unexpected corpse in the River Teign. He determined to pay an early visit to his mother, sister and brother at the family manor at Stoke-in-Teignhead, the road to which passed through Dawlish. It only required Hilda’s elderly husband, Thorgils, to be away on his boat – preferably as far away as St Malo – for John’s plotting to come to delightful fruition in the arms of the fair young wife.

  With these devious thoughts in his mind, he stole a covert glance at his wife as she chewed grimly, trying to gauge the depth of her current displeasure.