There was a slight movement from the end of the table. Stephen made a point of not looking. It was important that the Choristers should learn to respect and admire their elders, and if Adam took to bullying his nephew Luke, Stephen felt strongly that he, as a Canon, should not interfere. It was for them to resolve the issue. Luke in particular, he thought grimly, should learn humility. Otherwise he could succumb to the family’s weakness and sinfulness.
As he finished his bowl and began scraping up the last of the delicious liquor, there was a cough, and a stool scraped. Stephen looked up irritably.
It was Adam. His face had gone green. ‘I… I… feel…’ He clapped a hand over his mouth, but too late. To Stephen’s disgust a stream of vomit issued, spattering the table. ‘Good God!’ Stephen cried. ‘Go outside, you cretin, before you…’
He was too late. Adam fell to his knees, threw up once more, then collapsed retching.
Calling his steward, Stephen thundered: ‘Take that repellent fool out and get someone in here to clean the table. Ugh! He has quite ruined my appetite. What is it, is he drunk? Eh? Have you been drinking, you sot?’
Adam stared back, his eyes red and streaming, his mouth besmeared with vomit. ‘I’ve been poisoned, sir!’
After leaving the Coroner, Baldwin showed Simon Ralph’s shop. It was a small, narrow-fronted place, and Baldwin tried to peer in through the closed shutters while Simon stood back at the opposite side of the street and looked it over.
The shop in Correstrete had lime-washed walls and carefully painted woodwork to show that the dead owner had valued his property. The roof was shingle, and the wooden slats still possessed the fresh almost orange tints of newness. There was no chimney, nor any louvres through which excess smoke could leave. Two doors gave access, one to the shop, the other to the hall behind, and both were well protected by the overhanging jetty from the upper chamber, whose oak timbers looked newer than the rest of the surrounding woodwork, making Simon think that the glover had only recently put in the second storey.
Not many of the other houses in this street were so well appointed or modern. Most looked little better than hovels, with a uniformly slatternly appearance; Ralph’s stood out like a gentlewoman surrounded by drab sluts.
It was while he stood there that a beggar came limping along the road and Simon cast a scornful eye over him. From his threadbare fustian cloak to his scuffed and ruined shoe, the bowl hanging by a thong from his neck, the fellow looked every bit the professional beggar, and Simon had no wish to be bothered by his sort today. He and Baldwin were too busy.
Seeing how he curled his lip, John Coppe changed his mind about asking for money. Coppe was perfectly used to being ignored. He gave a mental shrug and considered the second man. Baldwin was at the door studying the shop, peering in through a gap, and Coppe began to wonder whether he had arrived just in time to prevent a theft. The cold had persuaded him to go and seek the warmth of a tavern, but now it looked as though his old friend’s shop was about to be broken into. He should call the Bailiff – and yet why bother? Whatever Ralph had owned was no longer his. The poor fellow was dead. Perhaps it was as well to let someone rob the place rather than see all Ralph’s goods fall under a tax or be legally stolen by the Receiver and others.
All these considerations flashed through Coppe’s mind as he hobbled along, and by the time he was close to the knight he had made up his mind. He tentatively held out a hand. ‘Master? A coin for some pottage?’
Baldwin gave the man a long, thoughtful stare, then nodded and reached into his purse. He drew out a coin. The beggar’s face lit up with delight when he saw it, and he bowed. ‘Thank you, Master, thank you.’
Coppe wanted to leave and invest the money in a refreshing pot of ale, but something made him remain standing there, watching the knight peering again through a shuttered window. ‘He’s dead, you know.’
Simon crossed the street casually as Baldwin nodded slowly. ‘I had heard. I wanted to see where he had lived.’
‘They ought to make him a saint,’ Coppe said gruffly.
Simon glanced up at the house. ‘Why? Was he good to you?’
‘He was always giving us money. Not like some of the tightfisted bastards in this city. If you was on fire they wouldn’t piss on you without charging for their time and trouble – aye, and for the ale they’d drunk, too.’
‘But Ralph was generous?’ Baldwin asked.
‘Him? He used to give feasts to the poorest of the city. At Christmas and Candlemas, and if the weather stayed bad, he’d give another on Lady Day. Any of us who could get to his door was always welcome to a pot of wine and some bread. He didn’t feel the need to wait for a feast day.’
Coppe was gazing up at the house with an expression of such sadness and longing that Simon found himself wishing he could have met Ralph. Certainly for a man to have earned the trust and loyalty of even a tatty beggar like this one spoke of his Christian spirit.
Baldwin interrupted his reverie. ‘Have you often been inside his hall?’
‘Often enough.’
‘I should like to go inside to see whether anything is missing. Would you know if anyone would have a key to it?’
John Coppe cast an eye up and down the knight, his mind recalling his first assumption. Baldwin did not look like a thief, but sometimes the wealthiest men in the land could behave worse than the poorest. That was how they became rich. ‘Why would you want to go inside?’
‘I am Keeper of the King’s Peace in Crediton and the Coroner has asked me to enquire about Ralph’s death. I want to see whether he was robbed of anything other than his money when he died.’
‘Oh! Well, in that case I’d try there,’ Coppe said, pointing at the house next door but one. ‘Ask for David. He used to see quite a lot of Ralph.’
It was a larger place, but not so well looked after, to Simon’s mind. The paint was peeling from the woodwork and the limewash hadn’t been renewed for many a long year. Strips had faded or been discoloured by the smoke and soot of the adjoining buildings and it had an air of shabbiness, like a woman who has lost interest in her looks and cares only for the essentials of life: no longer bothering about her physical appearance, only about being comfortable.
The owner was a cheerful enough fellow: stooped, peering through narrowed eyes under a thin greying thatch of curling hair. He wore a good quality shirt and tunic, although both had seen better days. He looked enquiringly at the three men when he came to his door, and when Baldwin told him who he was, he agreed to let them see the house and shop so long as he himself stayed with them.
‘This is fair,’ Baldwin said. ‘I would prefer witnesses.’
The four entered the dead glover’s hall first. The neighbour had a key and he threw open the front door, standing aside to let Baldwin lead the way inside, Simon behind him.
It was much like any other little hall. The corridor from the front door led along the length of the shop into the hall itself, behind which was a small pantry and parlour. Baldwin stood and contemplated the hall, then went upstairs with David while Simon went out and opened the door from the pantry. At the back was a little yard with a variety of plants growing in raised beds prettily laid out with wickerwork walls to keep the compost and manure in place. The back door was locked with a wooden peg that fitted into and securely held a latch.
Simon surveyed it, but it told him nothing about the death of the glover or the identity of his killer.
Walking back inside, he crouched at the fireside. Coppe had sat down on a stool at the wall and Simon saw that his foot had left ashy prints over the floor. When the door opened, a little of the fire’s ashes were disturbed by the draught, blowing out of the hearth and onto the floor where people would step in it and, like Coppe, tread the ashes all over the place.