‘Perhaps he’s also seeking sanctuary!’ said Gwyn with unconscious irony, after de Wolfe’s recent manoeuvre.
The coroner rasped a hand over his bristly cheeks as he thought of the various places Clement might have gone to.
‘Not the cathedral, it’s too obvious and too many people hanging about there. But what about St Olave’s; he is very friendly with that poxy priest, Julian Fulk.’
For want of any better idea, they set off down the High Street and across Carfoix to the little church at the top of Fore Street, founded by Gytha, the Saxon mother of King Harold. Outside, de Wolfe hesitated and beckoned to his clerk.
‘Thomas, I can’t go storming in there with a naked sword and I’m not leaving it in the street. You’re a priest. You go in and see if there’s any sign of him.’
He waited with Gwyn at the edge of the road, listening to the cries of other searchers lower down towards the West Gate. The fitful light of a gibbous moon appeared through a gap in the clouds and illuminated another group of men coming out of Milk Lane almost opposite, their tramping feet echoing in the night air.
Then their attention was jerked back to the church as Thomas’s face appeared in the doorway, looking even paler than usual, given the poor light.
‘You’d better come in, master!’ he said in a very subdued voice. ‘Sword or no sword, this is more important.’
John and his officer followed the clerk into the bare nave lit only by a pair of candles on the altar.
As Thomas led them towards the chancel step, he began intoning, ‘Domine, requiem aeternam dona eis, et lux perpetua luceat eis.’
A moment later they saw the outline of a man spreadeagled across the step, his arms outstretched as if in supplication to the cross on the altar table. De Wolfe bent and grasped the back of his hair and lifted the head to see the face.
It was Clement of Salisbury, his features contorted in a final grimace of agony, his mouth twisted into a rictus of pain. Smashed alongside him was a small pottery bottle, a trickle of dark liquid still seeping down a crack in the chancel step, just as the physician’s life had seeped away a short while earlier.
Next morning the main participants assembled again in the hall of Clement’s house. Mary had brought in pastries, ale, cider and wine from her kitchen, and they sat around the large table where some time ago John and Matilda had eaten supper with the physician and his wife.
‘How is the young maid today?’ asked the sheriff, who sat at the head of the table.
‘Recovering, thank the Blessed Virgin,’ said Enyd de Wolfe, who had appointed herself chief nurse. ‘She has regained her senses but has a severe headache and her face is sore from that bruise. The apothecary, bless him, has given her a strong draught to let her sleep today.’
‘The poor child must have had a heavy blow to the face,’ added Hilda, who sat next to John and held his hand under cover of the table.
‘My husband hit her when she tried to stop him assaulting me,’ whispered Cecilia. She had insisted on leaving her bed when the others came, saying that it was her throat that was afflicted, not her legs or brain. She wore a heavy blue brocade surcoat over her nightgown, the collar turned up over a swathe of bandage that Richard Lustcote had wound around her neck to hold his poultice in place.
‘Don’t strain your throat, dear woman,’ advised Enyd solicitously, but Cecilia said that whispering was not a problem.
‘I want to expose all the facts of this terrible matter, so that no one carries any further blame,’ she breathed earnestly. ‘The fault lay entirely in this household, I fear, for my husband was quite mad, though I did not fully realise it until last night.’
The others listened in horrified fascination as she slowly and quietly revealed the extent of Clement’s obsessions.
‘He did not move to Exeter to set up a better physician’s practice,’ she said. ‘We were forced to leave Salisbury because of his behaviour.’
‘In what sense, lady?’ asked Brother Rufus in a gentle voice.
‘His obsession with religion, which he must have had all his life, grew more extreme there. His first choice was to become a priest, not a doctor, but his parents would not allow it. Perhaps even then they suspected his strange notions.’
‘Which were?’ prompted Thomas, fascinated by this story of religious distortion.
‘That the perfection of the Church was established by the early founders in Rome and this was the only thing that mattered. Adherence to their precepts was the salvation of the world and any deviation from their rituals was the work of the devil.’
‘But many priests, especially in the higher orders, would fully agree with that!’ objected Rufus mildly.
Cecilia coughed and paused a moment to rest her voice, Enyd patting her shoulder and offering her a cup of watered wine.
‘Not to the exclusion of every other topic,’ she continued after a while. ‘He preached at me continually, always on the same theme of the purity of the Church of Rome and the need to be always vigilant against its enemies and detractors. It became so monotonous that I tried to turn away from God, but he punished me for it.’
‘Punished? You mean by force?’ asked Hilda aghast.
For answer Cecilia pushed up the loose sleeves of her surcoat and exposed her arms. They bore many yellow and green bruises, some of considerable age.
‘He often pulled and punched me, if I dared disagree with his ranting or was reluctant to go to devotions with him. But he took care to mark me only where it did not show in public’
‘The bastard!’ muttered John. ‘Who would have guessed it?’
‘The people in Salisbury, for a start,’ replied Cecilia. ‘Though he was an effective physician, as long as he was paid well enough, he could never resist preaching at his patients and became unpopular as a result.’
‘Was that cause enough to leave?’ asked Rufus.
‘The end began when he struck one woman who told him to leave religion to the priests and stick to prescribing pills!’ replied Cecilia. ‘The last straw was when he refused to treat a sick infant when he discovered it had not yet been baptised and it later died.’
‘And you say he was violent towards you — did he ever try to strangle you, like last night?’ asked Henry de Furnellis.
‘No, it was always shaking and striking,’ she said with tears in her eyes. ‘And he would also punish me by his strange ways in the bedchamber,’ she whispered, her pallid face flushing as she dropped her eyes in embarrassment.
The sheriff hurried to cover up her distress by changing the direction of his questions. ‘We need to know why he tried to kill you and how that was connected to the death of Lady Matilda next door,’ he said gravely.
Enyd held up her hand and then gave Cecilia a cup of warm honeyed milk. ‘She is talking too much, important as it is. Give her a moment’s rest, please.’
Mary, who was hovering in the background, occupied the break by handing round the platter of pastries filled with chopped meat and herbs and refilling empty cups from the jugs that stood on the table. Soon, Cecilia finished her soothing draught and handed the mug back to John’s mother with a grateful smile.
‘It all happened so quickly last night,’ she continued. ‘Clement had claimed he had a sore throat since the previous evening and had bound up his neck with a length of flannel, just as I am now!’ She smiled wanly at the ironic similarity. ‘Last evening he came in from his work and said he was going to apply more liniment to his throat, so went into the bedchamber. A few moments later I happened to walk in on him and found him with his tunic opened at the neck, as he pulled off the long strip of flannel.’
She stopped and stared down at her hands on the edge of the table, as if reliving that cataclysmic moment in her life.
‘And then?’ prompted John gently.
‘I saw that the skin of his neck was covered in scratches, running downwards under his chin and jaw. I knew what they were; they were made by fingernails clawing at his neck. Instantly, he tried to cover them up again with the cloth, to hide them from me, so I knew they came from some wrongdoing. My first thought was that they were from some woman’s passion in love-making, but then they should have been on his back and chest, not under his chin.’