John nodded and turned back to the hag. ‘You swear you did nothing?’
‘I told her there was nothing I could do and she went away, poor girl.’
John tackled her for a few more minutes, but there seemed nothing more she could or would tell him. He had the tickle of intuition that there was something else she might have said, but all his prising failed to bring it out.
When the bearded woman began a prolonged fit of coughing that ended in a trickle of blood at the corner of her loose-lipped mouth, he decided that enough was enough, and they squelched their way back to the relative civilisation within the city wall.
Chapter Ten
In which Crowner John defends a silversmith
For once, that Saturday evening was peaceful in Martin’s Lane. John decided that he had better give the Bush a miss and sit at his own fireside with his wife. The fire crackled cheerfully, thanks to a large supply of beech logs that Mary had piled up at one side of the cavernous hearth.
However, the atmosphere was still hardly jolly as John sat, fidgeting and bored beyond measure. Matilda, determined to play the devoted wife for once, worked with her needle – or, at least, at untangling skeins of silk thread that one of her cronies at St Olave’s church had given her for embroidery. De Wolfe hunched in his seat, his body burning on the side facing the fire and shivering on the other, as the inevitable east wind found its way across the stone floor. As well as a chimney, Matilda had insisted on flagstones, considering the usual warmer straw- or rush-strewn floor as low-class.
Outside it was pitch dark, though the sixth bell had not yet sounded from the cathedral, a few hundred yards away. The snow still came down in irregular flurries, sufficient to whiten the roofs but not enough to settle on the muddied ground.
John had disgorged all his news and had fallen silent for lack of anything else to say. Matilda had heard his account of the unproductive visit to Bearded Lucy with a disdainful sniff, conveying her disapproval of his association with such common people.
To pass the time and relieve his boredom, he took to drinking more than usual. After a quart of ale at their evening meal, he opened a stone flask of Eric Picot’s French wine, digging out the wooden stopper with the point of his dagger after peeling off the waxen seal. His wife deigned to take a small cupful, most of which stood untouched alongside her chair, but the coroner attacked the red liquor with morose gusto. Eventually, his tongue loosened a little by the drink, he had the bravado to return to a subject that Matilda had vetoed earlier.
‘Are you quite sure that you have never heard of anyone who will procure a miscarriage in this town?’
She raised her broad face to give him a glare of disapproval. ‘I told you, John, that kind of matter does not concern me. It is a crime, as well as a sin against the holy teachings,’ she proclaimed virtuously.
‘But among the ladies’ gossip, surely there are whispers now and then of such happenings,’ he persisted.
Matilda hesitated. ‘Well, some years ago, one of the wives of a rich woollen merchant, who already had six children, fell desperately ill with a purulent fever after dropping a baby at the fourth month. There were rumours that she had deliberately sought damage to herself to get rid of the child, but nothing was definitely known.’
‘And who might have done the damage?’
She looked at her husband with pitying contempt at his naïvety. ‘How would I know that? She was hardly likely to vouchsafe the details, it was but a rumour. I do know that the leech Nicholas of Bristol treated her almost mortal fever – and did it well, by all accounts, for she survived.’
John stored away this nugget of information and fell to drinking again, as the wind whistled outside and his old hound Brutus crawled surreptitiously nearer to the fire.
Elsewhere in the city, the recent crimes against two of its womenfolk were under earnest discussion, the same person figuring largely in their arguments.
‘Why did de Revelle release them within the hour?’ demanded Edgar of Topsham. ‘Someone in that shop knows about the attack on my Christina yet the sheriff has let it go by default.’ He was sitting again in Eric Picot’s bachelor room above the wine store in Priest Street, with his father and the Breton huddled around the hearth.
‘I discount those two smiths,’ said Picot. ‘Granted, they are unintelligent scum, but all such workmen make eyes and catcalls after pretty girls without having to be ravishers. I still think that their master could tell us a thing or two about what went on that night.’
Edgar muttered incoherently at this, his thin face reddening in the firelight and his hands grasping at his knees, as if in practice for gripping the throat of Christina’s assailant.
‘We have no proof whatsoever that anyone in that silversmith’s place had anything to do with this,’ said Joseph reasonably, but his voice had a reluctant note, as if he wished he could say otherwise. He turned to Eric, his friend and trading partner. ‘Has Mabel told you anything useful since you spoke to her?’ Joseph tactfully avoided any reference as to why or when Picot might have been talking to Fitzosbern’s wife.
‘She would believe anything of that swine of a husband,’ said the wine merchant, with feeling. ‘But hard fact is another thing. She says he has made no mention of anything remotely concerning Christina, but he’s hardly likely to, is he?’
Edgar scowled. He was almost convinced of the master silversmith’s guilt. ‘Did she give any account of his movements on Wednesday evening?’
Picot gave a Gallic shrug of doubt. ‘He was out from the seventh hour, when his workmen finished their labours. But Mabel says he is out almost every night. He attends many guild meetings and also visits several taverns. She suspects he has at least one other woman somewhere in the town, but certainly he was not at home from the seventh bell until about midnight.’
Joseph stroked his long grey beard. ‘That is poor evidence for his wrongdoing, unless we can discover where he was when this awful thing took place. But I see little chance of discovering that.’
The apothecary’s apprentice was getting more and more agitated as the conversation went on. ‘He is the man – I feel it in my bones! Fitzosbern is well recognised as a philanderer and lecher. The whole town knows it, but most are afraid to say so, because he is a powerful voice in the merchant guilds. Even the sheriff defers to him – look how he let off his two men with hardly a word.’ Edgar jumped up and began pacing the room, which was difficult as it was only about three steps each way.
‘For God’s sake, boy, sit down,’ snapped his father. ‘There’s nothing you can do without further proof.’
‘I’ll beat it out of him, see if I won’t,’ said his son wildly. ‘I’ll challenge him to a trial by battle.’
Eric Picot sighed. ‘You can’t do that. It’s almost impossible, these days. You have to go to five sittings of the county court first, unless the justices of assize declare he has killed one of your kin. And, anyway, Fitzosbern would almost certainly kill you!’
Edgar continued to throw himself about the room for a while, while the two older men talked together. Then he headed for the steps to the ground floor. ‘I’m going to visit Christina, to see what she says. I can’t sit around like this, doing nothing.’ He clattered away, while his father and his friend looked at each other and sighed.
In Goldsmith Street just off the high street near the Guildhall, Guy Ferrars was also with his son, closeted in the room that Hugh rented from de Courcy’s friend. Like the group in Priest Street, they huddled around the fire in a high, draughty room, discussing the tragic events of the day.