‘You’re bleeding, Crowner,’ said the man with the lantern. ‘The back of your head has taken a nasty knock.’
De Wolfe looked blearily at his bloodstained fingers, then tried to get to his feet. He failed miserably, and fell back against the tree.
‘Stay quiet, sir, you need someone to attend to that cut. We must get you to St Nicholas’s, that’s the nearest place.’
Though his head was throbbing like a drum, de Wolfe’s senses were rapidly returning. ‘Did you see anyone running away? he demanded thickly.
‘Not a chance,’ said the weaver. ‘It’s as black as the inside of a cow’s stomach tonight, Crowner.’
‘What was that over my face?’ he demanded, his memory returning piecemeal.
The weaver held up a large leather bag with a plaited string threaded around the neck to close it. Even in the poor light, de Wolfe saw that it was similar to the one that had been over the moneylender’s head, though such bags were commonplace.
‘Lucky you didn’t suffocate with that cutting off your air,’ said some morbid Jonah amongst the cluster of onlookers.
The weaver shook his head. ‘The seam around the bottom has ripped. There’s a hole in it, thank God.’
‘The footpad must have tugged it down too hard over your head, Crowner, and torn the stitching,’ added the porter. He thrust a hand into the bag and poked three fingers through a gap in the bottom. ‘There’s something in here, Crowner.’ He pulled out a crumpled scrap of parchment and held it close under the flickering light of the lantern. ‘There’s some writing on it. Can anybody here read?’
No one could, but de Wolfe stretched out a shaking hand to grab the fragment, his fury over having been assaulted fading as his fuddled senses realised what this meant. A warm feeling of relief flooded through him as it dawned on him that Thomas must now surely be saved. He slumped back and a contented smile relaxed his face in the gloom. If the Gospel killer was still active, then his clerk, locked in Stigand’s foul gaol, must be innocent! As the townsfolk fussed over him, he sent up a short and rather curt prayer of thanks to the God whom he was not convinced existed. Though he had killed many men himself and seen thousands more die on a score of battlefields, he surprised even himself at the depth of feeling he had experienced over the hanging of a miserable little scribe. He knew that Gwyn felt the same and wanted to tell his officer the good news — but that was impossible until the morning: Gwyn was at home in St Sidwell’s, outside the locked city gates. But at least he could tell Nesta, who otherwise would probably cry half the night.
‘Help me back to the Bush!’ he commanded, trying to struggle to his feet.
‘You’re in no fit state yet, Crowner,’ protested the weaver. ‘We’ll take you to St Nicholas’s to have your head seen to first.’ A forge-master from a nearby workshop dragged across a loose hurdle from around his yard and, though he protested, they laid de Wolfe gently on it and four of them trotted the few hundred yards to the little priory, with a posse of concerned neighbours running behind. The coroner was a respected and popular man in Exeter and his fellow citizens were determined to do all they could for him in this emergency.
As they went, he bellowed orders from his stretcher, his strength returning rapidly. ‘Send for Osric the constable, and all of you be sure to tell him exactly what happened, especially about the bag and that parchment.’ He wanted to make sure that independent witnesses confirmed the circumstances, so that the damned sheriff could not claim that he himself had fabricated them.
‘And someone go to the castle and call out whoever they can find — the sheriff, Ralph Morin or Sergeant Gabriel. We should have the streets searched, though God knows who we are looking for!’
He ended his stream of orders with a final demand that someone should go back to the Bush and tell the landlady what had happened.
The one person he failed to remember was his own wife, Matilda.
If the pockmarked prior of St Nicholas’s was annoyed to see John de Wolfe back again so soon, he concealed it well. He immediately sent the infirmarian to deal with the coroner’s head wound and, with the porter and the weaver standing solicitously by, the old monk cleaned and anointed the cut on the back of his scalp. ‘Nothing terrible, Crowner, but keep this length of linen bound around your head for a day or two to keep out the dirt,’ he instructed, as he wound cloth around de Wolfe’s scalp like a Moorish turban.
De Wolfe thanked him, then held up his fist, in which he still clutched the fragment of parchment found in the leather bag. ‘Can you tell me what is written here, Brother?’
The infirmarian took it and held it towards the pair of candles on a shelf nearby. ‘A few words, but I cannot fathom their meaning.’
‘What are they?’
The elderly Benedictine screwed up his eyes and held the parchment further away. ‘It says, “For thou do not enquire wisely concerning this” … whatever that might mean.’
De Wolfe looked blankly at him, forgetting the pounding in his head. ‘Is that from the scriptures?’
The infirmarian looked again at the words. ‘It certainly sounds biblical — but to my shame, I have no great knowledge of the Holy Book, being more concerned with potions and salves.’
The prior was hovering in the doorway, listening to what was said. He came forward and took the scrap of parchment from the monk’s fingers.
‘Neither do I recognise that quotation — but there are some further letters at the end …’ He pulled the fragment towards his nose, for unlike the older man, he was short-sighted. ‘They seem to be “Ecc”, which must surely refer to Solomon’s Book of Ecclesiastes — though it could also be Ecclesiasticus, the Wisdom of Jesus, son of Sirach, in the Apocrypha.’
John was not concerned with the academic origins of the words. As long as they came from the Vulgate, that was good enough to lay them at the feet of the murderer. At the moment, all he cared about was saving Thomas de Peyne from the gallows tomorrow and even the prospect of catching the killer took second place to that.
The significance of the quotation was at first obscure, but on thinking about it a little more, his still-shaken brain decided it was a rebuke for being too searching in his investigations. That was good, he thought, for it meant that the culprit was getting worried that the law was closing in on him.
Events moved quickly after this, as did de Wolfe’s return to full activity. He was a tough old soldier who had suffered a multitude of injuries far worse than this and, within an hour, was able to stand and walk about, though his head still ached abominably. Before that, though, Nesta had arrived breathless and, ignoring the gossip that was sure to follow, threw her arms about John and tearfully celebrated both his lucky escape and the reprieve it surely must mean for Thomas.
‘You could have been killed,’ she snuffled. ‘And almost in the backyard of my own tavern! I feel responsible for letting you walk out into such danger,’ she added illogically.
‘The crowner was a lucky man, mistress,’ said the weaver, grinning at the sight of the coroner and his mistress showing such public affection, and in a priory, of all places. ‘The knock on the head was not too bad, but that bag over his chops would have smothered him, had not the stitches given way.’
This sent Nesta into another paroxysm of emotion, which was cut short by pounding feet outside and the entry of the huge castle constable, Ralph Morin, followed by Gabriel and Osric, the town guard.
The story was told all over again and the leather bag and the parchment passed around, for de Wolfe was anxious for them to verify all that had happened, to defeat any counter-attack by the sheriff and the Justices. ‘Osric, make sure that you get the name of every man who came to my aid in Smythen Street tonight. They may be needed to give testimony.’ Ralph Morin, a good friend of de Wolfe and a covert adversary of de Revelle, promised he would send all the available men-at-arms from Rougemont to scour the streets, though this was little more than a gesture in the pitch dark, when they had no idea who they were looking for.