Baldwin shook his head slowly. ‘A hard way of life for a man of his age.’
‘Perhaps he has a friend who can help him. I do not know,’ the Dean said. ‘So long as he leaves Exeter soon and our lives can return to their even tenor. Oh — ah — yes, and there was the other thing: Matthew. He has confessed to trying to kill you. It was only the darkness, he said, that saved you, for otherwise he would have aimed true.’
‘Did he shoot from the Charnel Chapel?’
The Dean glanced at him, hearing his tone. ‘Yes. Why?’
Baldwin shook his head. There was no possibility that he would leave himself open to accusations of superstition by admitting to his strange feeling of fear at the sight of the chapel. ‘Nothing.’
‘It’s curious, though,’ the Dean said. ‘He did mention that he regretted standing on the chapel to fire. He felt quite sickly and weak up there, as though the building itself was moving under him when he released his bowstring. I think he must have been drunk.’
Baldwin smiled and nodded, but in his mind he wondered. ‘The chapel was built because of one clandestine murder. Would it be so surprising if a man involved in that murder felt the earth move beneath him when on that same spot, he tried to kill again?’
‘Hah! You think he was weak in the head?’
Baldwin smiled, but as he closed his eyes, he had a notion that he would not feel so anxious at the sight of the Charnel Chapel again.
Still, he was determined that under no circumstances would his own body be buried here in Exeter. He would be buried in Cadbury or Crediton. He did not want his bones to rest in the chapel of bones. He wanted nothing to do with the place.
*A History of the Diocese of Exeter by Rev. R.J.E. Boggis MA, BD (1922). See pp. 142-5.
*Crown Pleas of the Devon Eyre of 1238 (Devon amp; Cornwall Record Society, 1985)
* See The Boy-Bishop’s Glovemaker