The Sanctuary Seeker

by Bernard Knight

  There was a silence, broken only by the crackle of the burning firewood.

  ‘A likely story!’ sneered the sheriff. ‘He probably hammered you and it’s you who waited for your revenge.’

  ‘Who is there to support this tale?’ asked the coroner.

  Fitzhai shook his head. ‘All concerned are long melted to the four corners of the kingdom. But it’s true, I tell you … and I wish by the Virgin Mary that I’d never clapped eyes on the man in Honiton, even at a distance.’

  John was somewhat inclined to believe him: the story rang true, of a typical squabble among travelling soldiery. But there was no proof either way and he saw no logical way of finding it. He turned to the sheriff. ‘There’s nothing more he can tell us. What point is there in doing more – or even holding him in custody?’

  De Revelle stuck a thumb in his ornate belt. ‘I think he’s lying. But what does it matter? We have the means to determine the truth.’ He pointed his other thumb at the boiling water.

  Fitzhai roared and tried to shuffle backwards, but another a blow from one of the guards caused him to trip and fall full length on the beaten-earth floor.

  The Precentor, who wore his white surplice under a long black cloak, placed an embroidered stole around his neck, produced a prayer book and began to intone an endless dirge in Latin, incomprehensible to all but Thomas de Peyne, who began to cross himself furiously.

  John lost patience with them all. ‘This is a pointless ritual, which serves no purpose but to show the Bishop that something is being done to satisfy the de Bonneville family.’

  Abruptly de Boterellis stopped his Latin monologue and glowered at the coroner. ‘Have care, de Wolfe. What you are saying is perilously near sacrilege. The ceremony of the Ordeal is hallowed by Christian usage and sanctioned by the Holy Father in Rome, as well as all our bishops. To call it a pointless ritual could be construed as blasphemy.’ He resumed his reading and the sheriff stalked to the tall bucket over the fire.

  ‘Is the stone already at the bottom?’ he demanded of Stigand.

  ‘It is, sir, a full two-pound weight, a pebble from the river bed. The one we always use for the test.’

  Ralph de Morin, as constable of the castle, was the commander of the guard and now signalled to the men-at-arms to start the proceedings.

  Alan Fitzhai struggled violently against the grasp of his two guards, but they dragged him towards the vat of boiling water. As the steam billowed about his head, he screamed, ‘Why are you doing this to me? I’ve told you what you wanted to know.’

  Richard de Revelle and the Precentor looked on impassively, but the coroner was more than uneasy. ‘The man has nothing more to tell us!’

  The sheriff rounded on his brother-in-law. ‘Whatever you claim your duties to be, your business here is as a witness only, so hold your tongue.’

  John could not dispute this, so he watched reluctantly as Fitzhai was manhandled to the tall bucket.

  The Precentor mumbled another Latin passage from his book, then closed it and held up his right hand, two fingers together pointing at the roof, the others folded in his palm. He chanted some unintelligible exhortation in a high falsetto, while the sheriff addressed the still struggling and cursing Fitzhai. ‘You are fortunate, partly because we acknowledge that you are a Norman and have taken the cross to fight in the Holy Land.’

  Fitzhai spat contemptuously at the vat, his spittle hissing into vapour as it hit the hot metal. ‘Fortunate! A bloody strange way you have of regarding my virtues.’

  De Revelle ignored this. ‘You could have been made to carry the hot bar or walk the ploughshares. This ordeal of boiling water is the mildest of all.’ He pointed at the bubbling surface. ‘You must know well enough what is to be done. You will reach to the bottom of the bucket, using your right arm to your armpit, to seek the stone that lies on the bottom. You will take it out and drop it upon the ground.’

  Fitzhai went pale as time ran out without reprieve, but when hope had gone, he was brave enough, except for one thing. ‘I beseech you, not my right arm! Let me use the left.’

  Richard de Revelle stared at him in surprise. ‘What difference does it make, man?’

  The priest stopped chanting his dirge to say, ‘It must be the right arm. It is always the right arm.’

  John de Wolfe, a soldier himself, knew well why the victim made the request. ‘He’s a fighting man, he makes his living by battle. Ruin his sword arm and he’ll have no means of livelihood.’

  Fitzhai looked gratefully at the coroner, who seemed to have a trace of sympathy with him.

  The sheriff was impatient with these trivia. ‘Use whatever damned arm you please! Now off with your tunic and shift.’

  The imminence of agony again broke his self-control and, against his struggling, the guards pulled off his upper clothing, leaving Fitzhai’s torso, rippling with muscle, naked in the flickering torchlight. He stood shivering with fearful anticipation while the priest again stopped chanting and began to speak. ‘You will remove the stone from the water, as is ordained by the usage of the Holy Church. Your guilt or innocence of the crime with which you are suspected will be determined by the preservation of your arm. If you are innocent, God will protect it, if not, the signs of scalding will be apparent.’ Though John had witnessed ordeals before, the futility of the ritual was too much for him to remain silent.

  ‘How can the signs not become apparent, if the fellow has to grope around in a bucket of boiling water?’

  De Boterellis looked coldly at him. ‘Are you questioning the wisdom of the Holy Father’s pronouncements on a Christian purpose that has existed since time immemorial?’

  Fortunately, John had the sense not to pursue the matter – even the King’s coroner was not immune to charges of sacrilege.

  ‘That’s enough of this delay,’ snapped the sheriff. ‘Get on with it.’

  He stood aside and the Precentor made the sign of the cross over the bucket, mirrored by Thomas who skulked in the background.

  The guards shoved Fitzhai to the edge of the bucket, where he had a final spasm of cursing and shrinking back from the rim of the vat. One of the soldiers grabbed his left arm and forced it towards the water. At last, accepting the inevitable, the Crusader screamed, ‘Let me be, I’ll do it my way!’

  With a wild shout of defiance and despair, he plunged his arm into the bubbling, steaming liquid. Screaming in agony through clenched teeth, he bent so that his shoulder was almost in the water, groping desperately at the bottom, circling the base to find the rock.

  With a great cry of agonised triumph, he threw himself sideways to hurl the stone out of the bucket. It flew across the dungeon and bounced off a wall, to lie steaming on the muddy floor.

  Fitzhai crumpled to the ground, keening in pain and attempting to shield his scalded arm with his good one. Thomas de Peyne was quietly vomiting against the wall, until John curtly told him to pull himself together and make a record of the event.

  The sheriff and the Precentor murmured together in low voices while the men-at-arms, as sympathetically as they could without attracting the attention of Ralph Morin or the sheriff, lifted Fitzhai from the floor. They supported him while the gaoler shuffled across with a few handfuls of fresh hay and some rags. Well used to these mutilating ordeals, he studied the burned arm with clinical interest, inspecting the fiery red skin, the early swelling and loosening of the surface layer.

  Spreading the hay over the limb, which worsened the excruciating agony of the victim, he wound the grubby rags around the arm to hold it in place.

  Thomas de Boterellis stopped muttering to the sheriff and addressed Fitzhai, who was now dead white in the face and leaning heavily against one of the soldiers. ‘Your fate will be judged at noon, when the arm will be inspected. A ruddy hue is to be accepted as inevitable and will not deny your innocence. But if Almighty God causes the arm to blister, peel or suppurate, then your guilt is proven.’

  ‘And you will be hanged!’ added the sheriff robustly
.

  ‘After a trial before the Justices in Eyre,’ snapped John, ‘because the death for which you accuse him of murder was recorded in my rolls before you took him into custody.’

  De Revelle gave one his patronising sighs. ‘He goes back into the gaol, whatever is decided about when he is to be hanged.’

  ‘Prejudging it again, Richard?’ boomed the coroner. ‘The arm has not yet been examined. The miracle of innocence might take place, for all we know.’

  The look that the sheriff gave the coroner in response to his jibe suggested strongly that he had as much faith in the Ordeal as John and was looking forward to the hanging.

  ‘We shall see, Crowner, we shall see.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In which Crowner John receives news from Southampton

  The long palisade of turreted wall brooded over the busy quayside. Ships of all sizes, their yards carrying furled sails tilted up against the masts, berthed end to end against the wharf. Barrels, bales and boxes were being hurried up and down a host of gangplanks that levelled off gradually as the tide went down in the Solent.

  Gwyn of Polruan ambled from tavern to inn, from inn to lodging house along the half-mile of rambling dockside. Huts, shanties and storehouses were built against the landward bank, amid the more solid houses of ship-owners and wool-traders. He had arrived the night before, after coming along the coast through the smaller ports of Lyme, Bridport, Weymouth and Poole. None had turned up any sightings of Hubert de Bonneville and Southampton was now his main hope. It seemed unlikely that the returning Crusader would have crossed the Channel further east, if the group that contained Fitzhai had intended to make for the Normandy coast at Harfleur.

  By mid-morning the massive Cornishman had visited a dozen drinking places on the quayside and even his iron constitution was beginning to feel the effects of a jar of ale in almost all of them. He sat for a moment’s respite on a bollard, a tree-stump set in the stone wharf, grooved by the hawsers of a thousand ships that had been tied to it. One such vessel was straining at it now, the ropes creaking as the hull moved slightly on the swell that flowed in from the sea beyond the Isle of Wight.

  It was a Flemish boat and was being loaded with bale after bale of English wool, squeezed into hessian bags and tied tightly with cords. A succession of labourers trotted up the gangway in pairs, each holding one end of a large sack.

  After a few moments, Gwyn’s head cleared and he suddenly discovered that he was hungry, needing something solid to soak up the lake of beer swilling around in his stomach. He left the tree-stump and went diagonally across the crowded quayside, dodged by handcarts, jogging porters, sailors and merchants. Wagons drawn by bullocks and dray-horses creaked slowly along the wharf, heaped with bales of wool, or barrels and jars of wine, kegs of dried fruit from southern France and dried meat and fish to victual the King’s army in Normandy. The air was redolent with a hundred smells, from the spices of valuable cargoes to the ubiquitous stench of dung that dotted the ground from the draught animals.

  Gwyn picked his way through the odorous puddles and stepped over ropes, heading for the next tavern, a large wood-framed hut with plastered wall-panels and a roof of bark shingles. Over the single door swung a crude gilded metal crown. Inside, the smoky, noisy interior was bustling with as much activity as the docks outside. Gwyn used his bulk to shoulder a way to a vacant space on a plank bench under a window, which was merely a hole in the wall with wooden bars set vertically.

  Eventually a slatternly girl with a strange accent that Gwyn thought might be from the distant North, understood his Cornish patois well enough to bring him horse-bread, cheese, mutton and more beer. As he filled himself, he looked into his purse to see how his funds were lasting. He had been two nights on the road and would need another two to get back to Exeter. The whole trip would cost at least eightpence and he wondered again where Master John found the money.

  He knew the knight had a fair income from his wool partnership, but Gwyn assumed that he also kept back some of the deodand and felony confiscations for working expenses.

  As he was chewing and meditating on his master’s finances, the man next to him drank up and left. Almost immediately the space was claimed by a bigger fellow, who dropped heavily on to the bench and bumped against Gwyn, jolting the arm that was just pushing a piece of cheese beneath his red moustache.

  ‘Sorry, mate – crowded in here, by God.’

  As he had had the grace to apologise, Gwyn mumbled something neutral, then noticed that the man, who had cropped hair and a bull-like neck, had the appearance of a soldier. He wore the same type of thick leather jerkin as Gwyn and a heavy belt carrying a curved dagger of distinctly Eastern pattern. As the newcomer waved hopefully at the serving girl, he displayed a wide gold ring with a crescent-moon motif carved into it.

  Using the camaraderie of the militia to start up a conversation, Gwyn struck a rich vein of information. The fellow was Gruffydd, a Welshman of Gwent, so he could converse with him well enough in his own Cornish. Gruffydd had been in Palestine for almost two years and his service as a mercenary archer overlapped the period that Gwyn had spent there with John de Wolfe. They had places, people and battles in common.

  ‘I came back only two months ago and am now hired to recruit more men for the King’s present campaign against Philip of France.’

  Gwyn asked if he knew any other returning Crusaders, especially Hubert de Bonneville or Alan Fitzhai. Gruffydd let out a bellow of affirmation and slapped Gwyn’s shoulder. ‘How the devil do you know those two?’ he demanded cheerfully. ‘They were both through here at different times. I offered Fitzhai a new contract to fight in France, but he said he had to visit his woman first and if he could find no fighting work down West, he would come back here to me – but I never saw him again.’

  Gwyn shook his head over his beer. ‘Nor will you, unless you have use for a one-handed swordsman.’ He told the story, ending with Fitzhai’s appointment with the ordeal.

  The Welshman was concerned; he had a soft spot for the extrovert Fitzhai. ‘And all this was over de Bonneville? And he’s slain?’

  ‘Fitzhai is in gaol as the prime suspect – on very little evidence.’

  Gruffydd shook his big head. ‘I can’t see him as a murderer – a killer, yes, but only when he’s paid to do it in battle.’

  Gwyn finished up his food and washed it down with beer. ‘That’s not what the sheriff thinks, though he’s keen for a culprit at any price. But tell me more about de Bonneville.’

  The story came out readily enough from the Welshman. He told Gwyn of the gossip about the fight the two men had had in France, which was news to the Cornishman as he had left Exeter before Fitzhai had blurted out the story. However, Gruffydd took little account of this, like the coroner considering it a commonplace rough-house between rowdy soldiers. But he also told Gwyn that Hubert de Bonneville had had a squire, a Saxon called Aelfgar of Totnes. The two had met in Palestine and had travelled home through France together, in the same party as Alan Fitzhai. Gwyn tried to get a description of Aelfgar from Gruffydd, but apart from saying that he was a burly thickset fellow with fair hair – which applied to half the Saxons in England – the other was not very helpful.

  ‘Did they leave this port together to travel to Devon?’ asked Gwyn, with little hope of more information.

  Surprisingly, the other man shook his head. ‘No, they didn’t. I tried to sign Aelfgar on for the French wars – I get a penny for every recruit,’ he explained. ‘But he wanted to go home to Totnes first. And, anyway, his master sent him on ahead to his own manor, some place far out beyond Dartmoor, as I remember.’

  ‘Why didn’t they travel together?’

  ‘De Bonneville had six of his own soldiers with him. They had all travelled back from Marseille and he wanted to pay them off in Southampton. Aelfgar told me, when he was making excuses for not joining my mercenaries, that his master wanted to sell some gold loot he had acquired in Outremer. He needed the money to pay
his men and wanted silver coin himself, so he was going to spend some time touring the goldsmiths and bargaining for the best price.’ Gruffydd grinned and prodded Gwyn with his elbow. ‘I think he wanted a week in the Southampton brothels.’

  Gwyn considered this in the light of the mouldered corpse up on Heckwood Tor. ‘So the squire goes off ahead of de Bonneville. And when did his master follow – any idea?’

  But Gruffydd had exhausted his information. ‘No, sorry, I don’t know that. I saw him in the distance in the town more than two weeks after I spoke with Aelfgar, who was leaving that day. But de Bonneville could have stayed here longer than that, for all I know.’

  Gwyn bought them both another pot of ale and they sat drinking companionably. Then Gwyn tried another question as a long shot. ‘I suppose you haven’t come across another Saxon soldier recently, a fellow with two of his fingers missing?’

  The Welshman roared with laughter and slapped Gwyn on his broad back. ‘Two fingers missing! I know twenty or thirty men who’ve run foul of either Philip’s army in France or the wrong barons in England. And quite a few bowmen, most of them from Gwent, lost theirs picking the wrong side when Prince John tried his tricks last year.’

  ‘This one’s called Nebba.’

  Gruffydd’s mirth increased. ‘Nebba! That son of a bitch! I wouldn’t trust him further than I could throw a donkey!’

  Gwyn’s ginger eyebrows rose up his forehead in surprise. This fellow seemed to know every soldier in Christendom. ‘Tell me about him, for God’s sake! He’s not another of this bunch that landed from Harfleur, is he?’