‘Sirs, the strain of the moment tells on us all, especially those so close to the dead lady. But we have work to do, if we are to seek the perpetrator of this crime. I need you to look at the corpse and confirm that it is indeed Mistress de Courcy.’ Grudgingly, he added, ‘And I suppose the crowner needs something similar for his formalities.’
In another part of the small city, Edgar was back at work in the shop of Nicholas the apothecary. He had been up to see Christina again and was mortified to find her listless, silent and apparently uninterested in his presence. In spite of Aunt Bernice’s feeble attempts to bring them together, the Portreeve’s daughter had sat pallidly in her chair by the hall fire, staring at the crackling logs, unresponsive apart from a few murmured monosyllables in answer to his attempts at sympathy.
The skinny young man sat forlornly on a stool near her side, the fringe of his hair hanging lankly down his forehead as he tried helplessly to find something to say that would arouse the smallest spark of animation in her lovely face. Edgar’s feelings were ambivalent. One minute he was melting with anguished pity for his intended wife, the next he felt as if he lived in another world from the stranger called Christina. Endlessly, he thrust down the devil’s thought that he could now never bring himself to marry her, a woman who had been known, in the Biblical sense, by another man.
After half an hour he gave up and, with a shaming feeling of relief, made some excuse about having to get back to his apprentice-master.
Edgar escaped into the high street and wandered blindly past the Carfoix crossing and into Fore Street, where Nicholas of Bristol had his establishment. As he went, the sense of shame at his own inconstancy gradually faded, to be replaced by growing anger. This always seemed to happen when he left the Rifford house and walked out among other people. His anger was diffuse, directed against the whole masculine world. For all he knew, the next elbow he knocked in the narrow street might be that of Christina’s ravisher.
He wanted to find that man and put a sword through his ribs – not only in retribution for the girl’s defilement, but in revenge for the way in which his own well-ordered life had been turned upside down. His wedding was now in jeopardy, people’s fingers would be pointed at him as the lover of a sullied woman – and his treasured training as an apothecary was disrupted by all these turbulent emotions.
As he hurried along, lurching into passers-by without taking the slightest notice of their protests, he felt for the hilt of his dagger, for he carried no sword. Muttering under his breath, he prayed to all the saints he could remember that they would put the rapist in front of him at that very moment, so that he could inflict unimaginable tortures and wounds upon him with the point of his knife.
As he reached the leech’s shop, sanity came upon him abruptly and, with a further flush of shame, he took his hand off his dagger and composed himself. He had realised how ridiculous his behaviour was. It was almost as if the proximity to the apothecary brought him back inside the aura of medical ethics. Edgar was an earnest young man and had read of the Greek Hippocrates, Father of Physicians, who had preached that, to a healer, everything was transcended by the welfare of the patient. Confused, he shook his head, as if throwing off devils, and pushed open the door of the shop.
Inside, the familiar scene and the smell of herbs and potions immediately calmed him. A woman was at the counter with a small boy, purchasing a salve that Nicholas was pressing into a small wooden pot with a bone spatula. ‘What do you think of this Master Edgar? Look at the lad’s hands.’
Nicholas was a good teacher and shared the experience of every patient with his apprentice. Edgar forgot his troubles for a moment, to immerse himself in clinical diagnosis. A quick glance at the reddened pits in the webs of skin between the child’s fingers told him it was scabies.
‘Quite right, Edgar. And what will you ask this good lady?’
The apprentice turned to the woman, an anxious-looking merchant’s wife from Mary Arches Lane. ‘Have you other children, mistress?’
‘Three more boys and a girl.’
‘Then smear the same ointment on their hands, for if they haven’t caught it yet they soon will. And keep an eye on the rest of their skin for similar itching marks, though you needn’t look above their neck, they never get afflicted in the head.’
As the woman left the shop with her greasy salve, Nicholas beamed at his apprentice’s medical acumen. The apothecary was a short man of about forty, rather pasty-faced, with a shock of curly hair, prematurely grey. He had a major affliction in that a palsy of the face had struck him five years ago, leaving him with the left corner of his mouth and left eyelid sagging, the cheek drooping like a wrinkled leather purse. His lips would not quite close and spittle tended to dribble out of the corner of his mouth, which he constantly wiped away with a piece of cloth. Nicholas enquired gravely about the situation in the Rifford family and showed considerable sympathy with Edgar’s current mortification.
The young man from Topsham was his only apprentice and Nicholas was a kind and considerate master, which Edgar repaid by being a devoted and hard-working assistant. They spoke for some time about the awful affair, little knowing of an even more awful business that was taking place only a few hundred yards away at St Nicholas’s. Edgar soon got back to work, checking bottles and jars and refilling empty ones from stock.
As he reached up to place pottery jars with Latin names on the shelves that ran all around the walls, the apothecary was chopping herbs with a large knife on a wooden board placed on the counter. They were the last of the season, to be dried for winter use. As he methodically tap-tapped across the board, he chatted to Edgar, to try to divert the younger man’s mind from his problems. They discussed the batch of fungi that Nicholas had brought in from the fields around the city that morning, those that were good to eat, that had medicinal properties and those that were poisonous.
‘Where did you learn about such things?’ asked Edgar curiously.
‘From my own master when I was an apprentice in Bristol. He used to send me out into the woods and pastures around the deep gorge above the river, to search for such moulds, and then he would test me on their names and their properties.’
‘Is that why you are called Nicholas of Bristol – because you were apprenticed there?’
The apothecary stopped chopping for a moment to reflect. ‘I was only called that after I came to Exeter six years ago. I was born in Bristol and my father was Henry Thatcher, for that was his trade. I was just plain Nicholas there, even when I had my own apothecary’s shop near the quayside.’
For a moment, his apprentice was diverted from his troubles. ‘So why did you leave Bristol, if it was your birthplace and where you had a business?’
Nicholas seemed rather evasive. ‘Trade was not too good – half my customers were sailors or whores who came to have their clap treated. I decided to start afresh somewhere else, before I got a bad reputation as being only a pox-doctor.’ He seemed reluctant to pursue his past history and changed the subject.
Their talk ranged from this week’s executions at the gallows outside the city to the price of unspun wool, which they used for dressings and padding splints. Edgar was an authority on the wool trade, through his family’s business, and explained that this year’s poor crop had pushed up the price, especially as the demand in Normandy and Brittany was now greater.
Privately, Nicholas wondered why his apprentice was so keen to pursue the vocation of apothecary, having a ready-made and lucrative trade in the family, which Joseph of Topsham was obviously keen to hand on to his son.