The gaoler shuffled across to them, his flabby face appearing to join his gross body without the need for a neck. Two piggy eyes surveyed them and his loose lips quavered as he saw the coroner and his officer, as he had suffered from their tongue-lashings several times in the past.
‘Are those two men still here, the ones who are going down to the cathedral proctors?’ demanded de Wolfe.
Stigand nodded, but said nothing, and plodded across towards the iron grille. This reached up to the low ceiling and had a gate in the centre, secured with a chain and padlock. They followed him, regarding with distaste the short and filthy tunic he wore over bare legs. His unshod feet were black with dirt, and his leather apron was spattered with dried stains, the nature of which John had no desire to contemplate.
A ring of keys hung from his belt; he took one to unlock the gate. ‘They are in the first two cells,’ he said thickly, speaking as if his tongue was too big for his mouth.
The two visitors went into the prison, where a short passage led between half a dozen crude cells, each with a door of rusty iron bars. Only the first on each side were in use and as soon as the coroner and his officer appeared, the occupants began shouting at them.
‘I thought you were the proctors’ men — where are they?’ demanded Alan de Bere arrogantly. ‘We don’t want you bastards. We want to be taken out of here!’
Gwyn poked a brawny arm through the bars and hit the renegade monk in the chest, making him stagger backwards into the filthy alcove, where the only furnishings were a stone slab for a bed and a wooden bucket for slops.
‘Watch your tongue, brother, else Stigand here might feel inclined to cut it out,’ he said amiably.
De Wolfe turned to the other side, where Reginald Rugge was glowering at them through the bars.
‘Talking of cutting out tongues,’ said John, ‘do you know anything about the death of Nicholas Budd? For if you do, your good bishop may be handing you back to us for hanging!’
Blustering, but uneasy at the prospect the coroner had forecast, Rugge loudly denied any knowledge of the bizarre killing of the woodworker.
De Wolfe swung around to Alan de Bere. ‘And you, monk, did you take a knife to his throat? Or was it Vincente d’Estcote you killed and left to be dropped into a plague pit?’
Rapidly, he went back to the lay brother. ‘And was it you who took a trip to Wonford and stuffed a murdered man into a privy?’
John knew full well that he was unlikely to get a sudden confession from these men, but he always felt that if you shake a tree hard enough something might fall out.
When their loud protests of innocence had subsided, he changed the direction of his provocative questions.
‘Right, if you are as white as the driven snow over those killings, then tell me instead who put you up to inciting this riot on the quayside, eh?’
Rugge grasped the bars of his cage and glowered at de Wolfe. He looked like some madman, with his tousled dark hair stiff with dirt from the cell, bits of straw sticking out at all angles.
‘Why should anyone put us up to it?’ he ranted. ‘It is a Christian duty to cleanse the world of such vermin, who are increasing like the rats they are, procreating new blasphemers!’
Alan de Bere joined in from the other side, beating on the rusty iron barricade in his frenzy. ‘We need no one to encourage us in our God-given task!’ he brayed. ‘The good canons and proctors do their best, but they are frustrated by such as you unbelievers.’
Rugge returned to the tirade. ‘Even the bishop and his archdeacon are little help. They are too concerned with the trivial rituals of the cathedral and the finances of their treasury to bother with the cancer that is rotting the Holy Church in the shape of these heretics!’
The coroner was not impressed by their fervent denials. ‘You were only too willing to murder those men on the wharf!’ he shouted back at them. ‘If I and other forces of law and order had not arrived in time, you would have hanged them out of hand! Is that the act of the Christians who you are so keen to defend? I thought that kindness and compassion was the code that they professed.’
Reginald Rugge had a ready answer for him. ‘Like the compassion you Crusaders showed at Acre, when you and your king beheaded almost three thousand Saracen prisoners?’
‘That was an entirely different matter; that was war!’ retorted John, but he felt uneasy, as it was an episode that had shaken his respect for his hero, Richard Coeur de Lion. ‘And anyway, as Mohammedans, were they not the ultimate heretics in your eyes?’
What promised to become a theological altercation conducted at the tops of their voices was interrupted by the sound of boots on the steps outside and calls for the gaoler. Stigand shuffled out through the gate and a moment later the two proctors’ bailiffs appeared, clutching their long staves. Herbert Gale also had a coil of thin rope in his other hand. Like his colleague William Blundus, he was not pleased to see the coroner and his officer.
‘These are our prisoners now, Sir John,’ grated the senior bailiff with reluctant deference to the coroner’s rank.
‘And you are welcome to them, for now,’ snapped de Wolfe. ‘I suspect we may have the pleasure of their company here again, when the bishop decides to turn them over to the secular powers for sentencing.’
He said this more for his own satisfaction than in any hope of it being true, for he knew that the Church liked defying the king as a matter of principle, especially as Bishop Marshal was a supporter of Prince John in the latter’s striving to depose his elder brother from the throne of England.
He stood aside with Gwyn as Stigand unlocked the chains around the two cell gates and let the prisoners out into the passage. They watched as Blundus took the rope from Herbert Gale and tied one end around the wrists of the wretched monk and the other in a similar fashion to those of Rugge.
‘Come on, then, down to the Close with you!’ commanded Herbert Gale, grabbing the centre of the rope and tugging the two men out into the undercroft. With a smirk of triumph at the coroner, Alan de Bere followed, stumbling alongside his fellow prisoner. With William Blundus bringing up the rear, they climbed the steps to the inner ward and vanished.
Gwyn spat contemptuously on the ground. ‘Did you see the wink that bastard Blundus gave them as he tied them with those knots that a newborn babe could undo? I’ll wager they’ll be on the loose again before the sun rises tomorrow!’
At the dinner table John thought it politic not to mention to Matilda his meeting with Cecilia that morning, as it would only be asking for more sneers about his trying to inflict his lustful desires upon the fair lady. However, given what the physician’s wife had had to tell him, he wanted to know what Clement had been saying in the chapter house that morning.
For once, Matilda was only too ready to talk. ‘It was a great success, thanks be to the doctor!’ she effused. ‘Some of the canons were most receptive, and Robert de Baggetor actually apologised for the leniency with which those blasphemers were treated.’
Then she glared at him over her bowl of hare stew. ‘Your friend the archdeacon tried to play down the whole affair and came in for some criticism — and your name was bandied about, much to my shame!’
He ignored this and asked, ‘Did your delegation actually go into the chapter meeting?’
She shook her head sourly. ‘The archdeacon forbade it. He said that it was a private conclave of the cathedral. We had to stand outside in the cold and petition the canons as they came out.’
De Wolfe speared a leg of hare with his eating-knife and added it to the broth in his pewter bowl. ‘And what part did our neighbour play in this enterprise?’ he asked in a neutral tone, not wanting to arouse any more of his wife’s antagonism.
‘He was our leader, rather than Father Julian,’ she said proudly. ‘He was most eloquent, polite and deferential to the higher churchmen, but still firm and persuasive. He emphasised that the population of the city were the soil from which the cathedral and other churches were nourished and it was only right that their voices were heard.’