Still unconvinced, de Wolfe gave one of his grunts. ‘Could be a suicide — we’ve both seen folk tie a weight to themselves to make sure.’
Gwyn snorted his derision as he untied the rope from both himself and the corpse. He threw the end back down the well to rescue Osric, who nimbly scaled the shaft with Rufus taking the strain at the top.
When they were all together again, they turned to the body, which lay crumpled, face down, in the yard. The two boys stood at a distance with Thomas de Peyne, Edward with his arm still around Harry’s shoulders, as if protecting him against the world as they watched with horrified fascination.
‘Turn him over, Gwyn. Let’s make sure it is Fitz-William.’
As soon as de Wolfe saw the face, discoloured though it was, he knew that this was the master shoemaker, for he had seen him about the town and at various Guild functions. Of middle age, he had fair hair cut short on his neck and a sparse beard and moustache.
‘He’s pretty blue in the face. Is that cord strangling him?’ asked the chaplain, pointing at a thin line wrapped around his neck.
De Wolfe bent down and put a finger between the cord and the skin. ‘No, it’s loose — the blueness is because he was face down for many hours, the blood sinks that way.’
‘No wonder he was face down with that damned great weight hanging around his neck.’ Gwyn lifted a crudely circular stone from Fitz-William’s chest. It was about a foot across and had a hole chiseled in the centre, through which the cord passed to suspend it from his neck.
‘That’s the top half of a hand quern, surely?’ exclaimed the monk.
The Cornishman slid the twine loop over the dead man’s head and stood up with the stone in his hands. He hefted it to gauge its weight then passed it to the coroner. ‘A good many pounds, that. It would certainly drop him head first under the water and keep him there.’
De Wolfe grinned lopsidedly at his officer, as he well knew what was in his mind. ‘Go on then, Gwyn. Perform your usual trick.’
The ginger giant dropped to his knees and placed the palms of his hands on the corpse’s chest and pressed hard. A gush of froth, tinged pink, erupted from Fitz-William’s nostrils and lips. Gwyn looked up, a satisfied smile on his face. ‘Drowned, no doubt about it. He was certainly alive when he went down the shaft.’
‘So why did he let someone hang a quern around his neck?’ demanded Rufus, to whom coroner’s enquiries were a novelty.
‘Perhaps for the same reason that the priest at St Mary Arches let someone push his face into a bowl of communion wine. Have a look, Gwyn.’
Still on his knees, the officer ran his big fingers over the sodden hair of the deceased and almost immediately found what they expected. ‘Swollen at the back — and I can feel a cut, with the bone crackling underneath. No blood, as the water has soaked it off.’ He stood up and wiped his fingers on his tattered tunic. ‘Exactly the same as the others. A hefty whack on the head from behind.’
Thomas, who had kept his distance while they prodded the corpse, left the two lads to come across to them. With a rather furtive glance at the boys, he pointed to the quern, which John still held. ‘That’s part of a hand-mill for corn, isn’t it?’ he asked.
‘Yes, a woman’s mill for the cook-house. It sits on another flat stone and she pours grain through the hole, then turns it round with her hands.’
‘Then I know what it means here — the scriptures again,’ said the clerk.
Before he had a chance to explain, Brother Rufus beat him to it. ‘Yes, Crowner, it’s obvious. The Gospels say, “Who so shall offend one of these little ones, it were better for him that a millstone be hanged about his neck and he were drowned in the depths of the sea.” ’ He jerked his head significantly in the direction of the two boys.
Thomas glared at the chaplain, outraged that he had stolen his thunder in front of his master. It was his task to interpret for Sir John, not this fat stranger! But worse was to come for the little clerk, as Rufus leaned over to look more closely at the quern. ‘Now that it’s drying, there are marks appearing — there!’ He pointed to some small scratches on the top surface, which appeared as fresh as those on the parapet of the well.
De Wolfe looked at them, but could make no sense of them.
‘Turn it round — they’re upside down this way,’ commanded the monk. ‘Now, see there — they read MT, MK and LK. That can only mean Matthew, Mark and Luke, the Gospels that record those particular words of Jesus Christ.’
‘Yes, St John doesn’t mention it,’ snapped Thomas, but he was too late, the monk had already stolen his glory.
The four men looked at each other then rather covertly at the two boys, who still stood together, watching them warily.
‘Is there no one else in the house?’ asked John.
‘No one. Fitz-William’s wife died in childbed years ago,’ answered Osric. ‘The lads work in the cordwainer’s shop during the day and wait upon the master when they return home. They were orphans, it seems, whom he brought here from a priory near Dorchester a couple of years ago.’
John rubbed his black stubble reflectively. ‘Then for their own sakes they had better be looked after in another priory here. St John’s is but a few yards away and they have almshouses and few orphans, as well as their hospital. I know Brother Saulf, who runs the infirmary. I’m sure he will take them in, at least for the time being.’
He lowered his voice to avoid the boys hearing him. ‘If this millstone business is what we think it means, then some delicate questioning is needed — but not at the moment.’
Together with the nearby hospital of St Alexis, founded by a wealthy city merchant a quarter of a century earlier, the priory of St John cared for most of the sick in Exeter. A mile or so away, the nuns at Polsloe Priory specialised in childbirth and women’s ailments. For the destitute, the aged sick and the beggars, St Alexis was the main refuge, but abandoned or orphaned children usually found a home in a priory or monastery, where they were often brought up to enter the Church.
Brother Saulf, a tall, wiry Saxon, administered the infirmary at St John’s and had helped the coroner on several occasions, the last when Thomas de Peyne had injured himself in his abortive suicide attempt. He sat now with the coroner, Gwyn and Thomas in a small room inside the porch of the priory. Brother Rufus had taken himself off to his little chapel in Rougemont and Osric had gone about his business, which included informing the two Portreeves that the city had just lost one of its burgesses.
The two boys had been delivered to the priory an hour before, and Saulf had settled them down in the refectory until it had been decided what was to be done with them. ‘They are apprentices of a sort, though Harry is very young,’ he explained to de Wolfe. ‘I had a long talk with them and they would like to continue at Fitz-William’s shop, to get themselves a trade for the future.’
‘Will the business survive his death?’ asked John.
‘No doubt of it. He has a partner with an equal share. They have half a dozen craftsmen making shoes in Curre Street,fn1 as well as the shop in High Street. The lads can carry on there and come back here to sleep until some better arrangement can be made. Maybe eventually the partner can accommodate them at the workplace.’ He gazed candidly at de Wolfe. ‘I think it best if they stayed here for some time, where they can feel safe and not be preyed upon as they were before.’
De Wolfe nodded, understanding. ‘You think it’s true then, that they were maltreated by Fitz-William?’
‘They admitted it to me, softly and reluctantly. He had brought them from Dorchester because they would not be known in the city.’
John had difficulty in suppressing the outrage he felt at two lonely boys being preyed upon by a pederast like Fitz-William. ‘Osric said he had heard rumours about Fitz-William from men in his shop, but there was no proof. He thinks the boys were too cowed to mention anything outside that damned house.’