By noon, Nesta knew definitely that she was pregnant. She had been taken by one of her maids to a house in Rock Street, where the girl’s mother had examined her. She was the self-appointed midwife and herbal healer to the street and the adjacent lanes in that part of the city. A rosy-cheeked widow, fat and amiable, she made Nesta welcome in the pair of small rooms she occupied at the back of the dwelling. After expelling a pair of boisterous children, she asked the innkeeper about her monthly courses and any symptoms that commonly went with being gravid. Then, with the rickety door firmly closed against the urchins, the midwife put Nesta on a low bed against the wall and gently examined her under the cover of her full woollen skirt. After a patient and careful examination with her warm hands, both on her belly and internally, she smiled and invited Nesta to rise, while she wiped her hands on a piece of cloth.
‘No doubt about it, my dear. You’re going to be a mother, bless you!’
As Nesta shook down her shift and rearranged her skirt, she asked the widow whether she could tell how far gone she was.
‘Hard to say, my love. It’s early, just enough for me to be definite about it. But you’ve plenty of time yet to make swaddling clothes!’
With that Nesta had to be content, and after failing to get the woman to accept any payment she walked silently home with her cook-maid, who solicitously held her arm as if she were likely to go into labour at any moment.
When they arrived at the Bush, Nesta climbed the steps to her room and threw herself on the bed that John had bought her the previous year.
She lay unmoving for a long time, staring up at the dusty rafters and the woven hazel boughs that supported the thatch. It was on this bed, she thought bitterly, that she and John had so often made love — and where she had betrayed him, albeit for such a short time. Nesta was well aware that he had not been faithful to her — but this was the way of men, who could rarely refuse the favours of another woman. Yet she sensed that lately he had not wandered from her, though she was realistic enough to wonder whether this was from choice or lack of opportunity.
But his actions were no excuse for her, though she had been provoked several months ago by his neglect. She had known that it was from force of circumstances, before another coroner was appointed for the north of the county, but she should have been more understanding. As she stared up at the roof, her eyes filled with tears as doubt and indecision clouded her mind. The midwife had confirmed what she knew already, as for several weeks something inside had told her as plain as day that she was with child. She wished that the woman could have been more definite about the duration of her pregnancy, but the widow was no professional and had done her best out of kindness.
Laying a hand on her still-flat stomach, Nesta wondered whether to love or hate what was growing within her womb. Turning on her side, she wept herself softly to sleep, for once uncaring about her busy taproom down below.
CHAPTER FOUR
The next few days passed quickly for the coroner, as there was a Summer Fair in Exeter, including a Horse Fair on Bull-mead outside the South Gate. Hundreds of traders flocked into the city, and stalls and booths sprang up along the main streets, though the focus of activity was in the cathedral Close, the fair being linked to a saint’s day. Many fairs in England were franchised by the Church, which made a handsome profit from licences to traders. Unlike some towns, which closed all the regular shops during the fair, the merchants of Exeter joined in the general scramble for custom, and for several days the city was a seething hotbed of buying, selling, trading, entertainment and revelry. Every bed in every inn was taken and the alehouses were overflowing with drinkers and drunks.
John de Wolfe was kept busy with a number of incidents, most related to the turmoil of the fair. There was a brawl at the Saracen inn on Stepcote Hill, in which a man was killed from being kicked in the head, several others being injured in the drunken mêlée. Then a visiting stall-holder from Dorchester was stabbed in a dark alley behind a brothel in Bretayne, the poorest part of the city. His purse was stolen and he died before he could be carried off to the small infirmary at the nearby St Nicholas Priory.
John managed to get to the Bush for an hour on Saturday evening, and upstairs in her little cubicle a subdued Nesta confirmed to him that she was indeed pregnant. As they both had more or less accepted the fact even before she had visited the midwife, it was no great surprise to him, but Nesta failed to respond to her lover’s efforts at reassurance and support. John was puzzled and rather hurt by her lack of reaction to his attempts at being enthusiastic about the future.
‘I’ll bring the lad up as if he were my legitimate son,’ he declared, oblivious to the fact that the child might be a girl. ‘If Matilda doesn’t like it, then to hell with her. We’ll live apart, it will be little different from my present existence.’
Nesta shook her head sadly. ‘How can you do that, John? Everyone will know — they’ll know even months before the birth, if I judge Exeter gossips correctly.’
‘What of it? I’ve told you before, half the men I know have one or two extra families about the place. Matilda’s own brother, for one.’
The auburn-haired innkeeper sat mutely, and John persisted in his uphill attempts to cheer her. ‘The name ‘Fitzwolfe’ sounds impressive, eh? Then later we’ll have to decide on his baptismal name.’
At this, Nesta burst into tears and an embarrassed and half-terrified John pulled her jerkily to his chest with spasms of his arm and incoherent mutterings intended to soothe her. He tried to console himself with the assumption that these strange moods were a passing symptom of pregnancy, like the strange appetites that he had vaguely heard about.
Though he hated to admit it even to himself, he was relieved when a tapping on the door heralded the potman. Old Edwin came to tell them that he was needed downstairs, where Gwyn was waiting with an urgent message.
It turned out to be a summons to a house near the East Gate, where a middle-aged cordwainer had returned early from his stall at the fair, to find his young wife in bed with an itinerant haberdasher, who had persuaded her into more than his ribbons and buttons when he called at the door.
When de Wolfe arrived, the haberdasher was lying naked and dead on the floor of the solar and the husband was spread-eagled across him, unconscious and bleeding from a deep gash on his scalp.
‘It seems the cuckolded merchant stabbed the fellow in the back while he was lying across his wife,’ explained Gwyn. ‘Then the woman got up and smashed the water pitcher over her husband’s head, in a fury at having been deprived of a far better lover than the shoemaker!’
The house was in chaos, with Osric the constable trying to restrain the screaming wife. The grandmother and several relatives were all shouting and wailing, and it was midnight before the coroner and his henchman could get away from the turmoil, John deeming it wise to attach the cordwainer for ten marks to appear at the inquest on Monday. There was no way in which the man would ever be convicted of murder, in the circumstances of finding a stranger in flagrante delicto with his wife. De Wolfe felt that a low-key handling of the affair was all that was required for the present — let the justices sort the matter out when they next came to Exeter.
The next day was quieter, so John could find no excuse to avoid being hauled off by Matilda to morning Mass at the cathedral, something she succeeded in doing about once a month. Unlike Gwyn, he had no strong objection to going to church, though he was supremely uninterested in both the future of his immortal soul and the boring liturgy purveyed by the clergy. Being dragged to the cathedral was at least preferable to her forcing him to St Olave’s, her favourite little church in Fore Street. One of his objections to this place was Julian Fulk, the smug priest who officiated there. During the recent spate of priestly killings in Exeter, Fulk had been a suspect and the collapse of John’s suspicions against him gave the podgy priest an extra reason to smirk at the coroner.