The monk grabbed him with a very strong arm. ‘Wait, John! If you break sanctuary, you may pay for it with your life. I’ll go and find out what all this is about, before you do anything rash.’ He vanished and, moving quickly for such a big man, hurried over to the keep. At the foot of the wooden stairs that went up to the entrance, he met Ralph Morin clattering down, Gwyn close behind him.
‘We must collect the sheriff from North Gate Street and get down to Martin’s Lane as fast as we can!’ shouted the castle constable.
As the three men set off across the inner ward, Ralph yelled at a passing soldier and told him to collect Sergeant Gabriel and half a dozen men, to follow them down to the town.
‘De Wolfe was on the point of breaking out when he heard the news,’ panted Rufus, his bulk beginning to slow him down. ‘I managed to stop him, but not for long, I suspect!’
Morin stopped dead near the gatehouse. Tugging at his forked beard, he made a decision. ‘He can come with us now! I’ll vouch for him. I’ll say he’s my prisoner under parole.’
Gwyn shot towards the chapel and immediately emerged with the coroner, who had been standing in the porch in a fever of anxiety.
‘We’re all going down to find Henry,’ snapped Morin, starting to jog again. ‘Officially, you’re my prisoner, John, so please don’t make a run for it!’
‘Why the hell should I do that now?’ retorted de Wolfe. ‘It sounds as if this might vindicate me, though I’m still not clear what’s happened.’
‘Nor am I, so let’s find out!’ growled Ralph.
They trotted down the hill and along the High Street and when they reached the corner of Martin’s Lane they heard and saw a crowd of people milling around outside the two houses that stood side by side opposite the livery stables.
‘Gwyn, go to the sheriffs house and drag him out,’ commanded Morin. ‘Tell him what you know and bring him back here as fast as you can.’
With John and Rufus at his side, Ralph pushed his way through the throng, where Osric and Theobald, the city constables, were trying to organise a hue and cry from the disorderly crowd. Inside Clement’s hall, a couple of local matrons were bending over the young maid, who was still unconscious.
‘She’s had a bad blow on the head, poor lamb,’ said one. ‘We’ve sent for Richard Lustcote the apothecary, but I think she should be taken to the monks at St John’s.’
A few candles had now been lit, and John, who suddenly became a coroner once more, suspected that by the look of the large bruise on her jaw, the girl had been punched in the face and had then fallen backwards, striking her head.
There was cry from outside the back door, and de Wolfe recognised Mary’s voice. He hurried out ahead of Morin and the monk, to see his cook-maid sitting on the earth in the gloom, still cradling the head and shoulders of Cecilia of Salisbury.
‘She has been throttled, John!’ said Mary, forgetting the ‘Sir’ in her agitation. ‘But she seems in no danger, though her voice has almost gone. But she managed to tell me that she cannot remember anything since he attacked her.’
‘He? Who’s he?’ demanded John, almost demented with mixed rage and relief.
‘Yes, what evil bastard did this?’ bellowed Ralph Morin from behind him.
‘She says it was her husband,’ answered Mary in a voice choked with emotion. ‘And she said that Clement also strangled my mistress, may God curse him!’
An hour later some order had been made out of the chaos in Martin’s Lane. The apothecary had examined both Cecilia and her maid, who was slowly showing signs of regaining her wits. Richard Lustcote decided that neither would gain anything by being carried off to St John’s Priory and that bed rest and some soothing potions would be the best treatment.
John had sent Gwyn down to the Bush to fetch Enyd and Hilda and soon they arrived, weeping tears of relief at his sudden deliverance from the accusation of murder. His mother clutched him to her breast as if she wanted to crush him back into the womb that had borne him, while Hilda braved his black stubble to give him tender kisses of thankfulness. Once they had vented their emotion, they willingly agreed to help tend to the two victims in Cecilia’s own house.
Instead of a solar, there was a bedroom partitioned off the hall, and here the lady of the house was gently laid on her couch. Lustcote applied some soothing balm to her bruised throat and gave her a honeyed draught to ease her battered voice-box. The maid normally slept in the warm kitchen-shed, as they had no live-in cook, so after her head wound had been cleaned and bandaged she was laid there, under the watchful eyes of a benign neighbour.
John had looked at the damage to Cecilia’s neck while Richard Lustcote was anointing it and saw typical finger bruises and nail scratches on the skin.
‘Almost exactly the same as those on Matilda’s throat,’ he told Henry de Furnellis when the men were standing around the fire in his own hall next door, drinking some ale after all the commotion. A dozen neighbours and a few men-at-arms had gone off around the city streets as the hue and cry, this time looking for Clement the physician.
‘Why the scratches, as well as the blue bruises?’ asked Brother Rufus, who did not intend to miss any of this drama.
‘From fingernails,’ explained de Wolfe. ‘Usually from the victim trying to tear away the strangler’s hands.’
‘Why should her husband want to kill her, for Christ’s sake?’ demanded Henry de Furnellis. ‘And why kill Matilda, as she claimed?’
John shrugged, though he badly wanted to know the answer himself. ‘When she can speak more easily, no doubt all will be made plain. In the meantime, where is that murderous bastard?’
The sheriff for once looked optimistic, a rare mood for him. ‘We’ll get him, never fear! I’ve sent soldiers down to each of the city gates, to make sure that tonight no one goes in or out. Hopefully, not a mouse can leave the city, so he must be in here somewhere.’
Leaving the women to look after the victims, they decided to join the hunt and, after placing a man-at-arms on the door, dispersed to join the various groups who had formed the hue and cry about the town. By now, the city grapevine had alerted almost the whole population; one of these was Thomas, who hurried up just as John and Gwyn were leaving.
His peaky face was creased in smiles when Gwyn explained that their master was now free from suspicion, and he crossed himself repeatedly as he murmured a prayer of thanks for John’s deliverance.
‘We’re off to look for this damned doctor now,’ rumbled Gwyn. ‘You’re the clever one among us — where do you reckon he might be hiding?’
‘Have you tried the place where he holds his healing consultations?’ suggested Thomas. ‘I think it was in Goldsmith Street.’
They hurried to the lane near the Guildhall, but found it was one of the first places that the men of the hue and cry had thought of. Theobald, the fat constable, was still standing outside the shop when they arrived.
‘Osric told me to keep watch in case Clement came back,’ he explained.
‘Came back? So was he here before?’ snapped de Wolfe.
Theobald waved a hand at the premises behind him, which was a former cordwainer’s shop with a wooden shutter on the front which was lowered to form a display counter.
‘The door was open and there’s some disorder inside, bottles and pills scattered on the floor, but no sign of the doctor.’
Thomas had a quick look inside the single room and came out nodding. ‘Looks as if he was searching for something in great haste,’ he reported.
The coroner looked from face to face. ‘Now where do we look?’ he asked angrily. He had collected his sword from his hall and was swishing it aggressively, as if practising to lop off the head of the man who had slain his wife.
As usual, it was Thomas who had the best suggestion. ‘The physician is a very devout man, perhaps abnormally so, by all accounts,’ he observed. ‘So perhaps he has taken himself to a church to seek absolution for his many sins?’