The little church, in whose yard the mound of soil was still fresh over the plague pit, also had a crude mortuary, an open lean-to shed built against one wall, where the corpses had lain overnight. The coroner and his officer arrived and were surprised by the large crowd who had assembled — and by the sight of none other than Thomas de Peyne, complete with his writing pouch, ready to record the inquest.
‘You should be in bed!’ protested de Wolfe. ‘What are you doing here?’
The clerk was unrepentant. ‘I am almost completely recovered, Crowner,’ he said firmly. ‘This awful event needs a proper record made, and you said yourself that the sheriff’s man was not satisfactory.’
Grudgingly, but with some concealed admiration, John muttered that as he was now there he might as well make himself useful. Gwyn fussed around getting him a stool from the church and a box to set his parchments on, then they got on with the proceedings.
The sheriff appeared, another unusual event, together with Ralph Morin and Brother Rufus from the castle.
It was noticeable that no one from the cathedral was present and that the only cleric, apart from Rufus and Thomas, was the incumbent of St Bartholomew’s.
The horror of the fire also brought out the two portreeves, Hugh de Relaga and Henry Rifford, as well as a number of the burgesses. The reason for this unusual interest was made obvious when, as soon as Gwyn had bellowed out the official call to order, the coroner began the proceedings.
‘This is an inquest into both the cause of the fire itself and the causes of death of the four victims,’ he boomed, standing up on an old grave-mound with his back to the wall of the church. ‘Such verdicts are usually of accident, but in this instance I have no doubt that you, the jurymen here assembled, will find that it was murder!’
A rumble of anger, shock and dismay passed like a wave over the deep half-circle of faces ranged before him, even though many either knew or suspected the fact already.
‘We must enquire into the deaths of Algar, a fuller of Milk Lane, together with Margaret his wife and his children, Peter and Mabel.’
The jury, eighteen men who had been at the scene the previous night, were ranged in the front of the crowd. They stared at this tall, dark man with an intensity driven by the anger in their hearts, and hung on his every word.
‘As you well know, myself, my officer and the city constables were at this conflagration last evening and we were there again this morning. We found certain evidence that makes it certain that this was no accident!’
His voice was harsh as he made it carry over the crowd, and they responded by a low growl of anger at what he was telling them.
‘Firstly, in spite of the damage by fire, we found a baulk of wood the length of my leg, jamming the only door, so that it could not be opened from the inside.’
He waved at Gwyn, who came to his side bearing a scorched length of timber, as thick as an arm. The coroner grabbed it and waved it in the air. ‘The bottom of this was set in a crack in the stones of the path so it could not slip, and the upper end was jammed under the middle cross-member of the door. It could not possibly have got there by any other means than deliberate malice.’
He handed the wood to the nearest juryman, who looked at it and passed it along to his companions.
‘When I entered the burning house to help retrieve the victims, there was a definite smell of naphtha, and this can be confirmed by Gwyn of Polruan, Osric the constable and several of you jurymen.’
He paused and Gwyn again handed him something.
‘This morning, when we searched the yard, we found this earthen jar against the fence.’
De Wolfe brandished a rough pottery flask of about a quart capacity above his head. ‘It smells strongly of naphtha, and there were a few drops of an oily liquid smelling strongly of that fiery substance still inside.’
Naphtha was a distillate imported from the Levant, an ingredient of ‘Greek Fire’, a highly inflammable substance used in grenades and naval warfare. John passed the jar to the jury, who sniffed it and muttered over it as it went along the line. But he had not yet finished with his indictment.
‘Inside the cottage, when we were able to enter it this morning, were the broken remains of yet another flask, lying in a corner.’ Gwyn provided a small wooden bucket, inside which were some shattered shards of a finely made pottery flask with a narrow neck still intact.
‘This can only be a container for brandy-wine, an expensive concoction from France, which has much pure liquor in it and is very easy to ignite.’
He beckoned to the next-door neighbour, whom he had designated to be the foreman of the jury, and handed him the bucket. ‘Tell me, from your close knowledge of Algar, was he likely to have brandy-wine in his house?’
The tone of his voice suggested the answer he wished to receive, but the man had no need of prompting.
‘By God’s truth, sir, not at all!’ he said firmly. ‘Algar was an abstemious man and also without any riches to spend on liquors. What they drank in that house was weak ale and good milk!’
The dramatic part of the inquest was over, but for form’s sake John called several of the neighbours to describe the suddenness of the fire late at night and the rapid conflagration of the straw roof, which made any approach to the front door impossible.
‘I think that incendiary stuff was thrown up over the front of the thatch. That broken flask must have fallen through when the roof came down later,’ claimed the foreman harshly.
‘Would most folk in Milk Lane be in their beds at the time the fire started?’ asked John.
‘Indeed so, sir! We are all milking people, with work to do before dawn, so we get abed very early. That is why the fire was so well ablaze before anyone noticed last night, as we were all asleep ourselves.’
There was no more relevant evidence, and the growling crowd had little need of anything further. John had one last order to make, a poignant and pathetic one.
‘It is part of the king’s law that the inquest must include a viewing of the cadavers by the jury. However painful this must be to you men who knew this family as neighbours and friends, you must see the bodies and confirm who they are and observe any wounds or other significant appearances. You will see that though there are numerous surface burns, there are no other injuries and that the skin of the victims is pink, showing that they drew down noxious gases into their lights before dying. This may be some consolation, as this can obliterate their wits and render them virtually dead before the fire reaches them.’
With a mixture of reluctance and suppressed wrath, the jury filed past a handcart which Gwyn pushed out of the mortuary shed. On it were four still figures, shrouded in clean linen, the wrappings turned back to expose the faces.
The man lay next to this wife, and nestled in the crook of each of her arms were her children. All the faces were tinted pink like ripe cherries, together with scattered burns from fallen thatch. There were sobs from some of the men and outright wailing from women in the crowd, who had a more distant view of the pathetic remains on the handcart.
De Wolfe watched impassively as the men returned to their places before him, though there was cold fury in his own heart at this atrocity. He scanned the crowd as he waited, identifying those from the castle and Guildhall — and was surprised to see Matilda at the back, attended by Lucille and Cecilia. At dinner he had told her briefly of the calamity and the findings of incendiary devices and the blocked door. She had listened in silence, but he sensed that it was not the silence of her usual indifference, but from horror and dismay. He had not known that she intended to come to the inquest, but there she was at the rear of the crowd, along with so many others who had come because of the killing of two innocent children and their mother.