The soldier motioned the carter to move directly under the gallows, while he walked up to the coroner and raised a hand to his chest in a perfunctory salute. ‘You need the names of these felons, Sir John?’
‘And their place of abode, if you know them, sergeant.’ He turned to point at Thomas, who was still leaning against the other side of the unused wagon. ‘Give them to my clerk there, to record on his roll.’
The soldier hesitated. ‘There was also a message I was to give you, Crowner. The town crier may have some news of the man found dead in Widecombe.’
News travelled fast within the closed community of Exeter, where every citizen was a professional gossip. They all knew about the man lying stabbed in the stream, fifteen miles from the city.
‘What news, man?’ demanded John.
‘I don’t know, sir. But a journeyman mason told the crier that he wished to speak to you. He is working at the cathedral.’ He turned on his heel and went about his business.
As John pondered the development in the Widecombe affair, the last act of the drama before him was being played out.
The hangman, who on days other than Tuesday or Friday, ran a butcher’s trade in the Shambles, climbed a rough ladder resting against the gallows cross-bar and pulled down two nooses that had been wrapped around the timber. Then he slid a plank deftly across the width of the wagon under the side-rails and climbed aboard. John sensed the hubbub of the crowd damping down, as the man untied the ropes that lashed the two victims to the cart, leaving their wrists tied. The old man he urged up to stand on the plank and the boy he lifted on to it. The child was keening softly, staring at his mother and father on the edge of the crowd in mixed supplication and incomprehension.
With the soldiers had come a priest, and he now began to read some unintelligible dirge in Latin from a book held before him, his tone suggesting that this was an unwelcome chore with which someone from the diocese was stuck every Tuesday and Friday. The hangman slipped the rope over the old man’s head and pulled it firm. Then he did the same to the boy, who began to screaming, his wails matched by heartrending cries from his mother. The crowd was silent, but as the executioner leaped from the wagon and smacked the horse’s flank, a low animal growl rose from the throng.
The mare, as well accustomed as the priest to what was required, moved forward with a jerk. The noise from the crowd swelled and, as the two victims tumbled first from the plank and then from the back of the moving wagon as it cleared the gallows, an orgasmal groan spread across the meadows.
The screeching of the boy was strangled into a gargling croak as the noose tightened around his neck and he began to kick furiously, constantly at first, then in spasmodic jerks. With a cry of despair, his father broke from the crowd and raced to the gallows. He flung himself around his son’s legs and pulled as hard as he could to shorten the death throes, oblivious of the collapse of his wife into a dead faint.
The old vagrant died as he had lived, quietly and inconspicuously. A few intermittent twitches lasted for several minutes as his soul left the unhappy body that had sheltered it for sixty years.
The coroner watched impassively, but with a return of the unease and foreboding that these rituals always generated. What sense could there be in publicly throttling a young lad who had run away with a pot worth twelve pence? Would there ever be a time in England when a better method of dealing with juvenile petty thieves could be devised? He motioned to Thomas and Gwyn as the two corpses made their last nervous twitches on the gallows.
‘Come on, Thomas – and you, Gwyn. There’s an inquest to hold, and on the way we’ll hear what this journeyman has to tell us about our mysterious corpse from the edge of Dartmoor.’
Chapter Six
In which Crowner John meets a mason
The crowd, their passions satisfied, drifted raggedly back to the town gates, the pedlars still trying to sell and the children still darting about in play.
The coroner strode out more robustly, overtaking the straggling throng on the muddy roadway, his small clerk almost running to keep up with him. Once in the town, they climbed the slope of South Gate Street and turned right into Bear Lane, which led towards the cathedral precinct. This part of Exeter was an island of episcopal independence, outside the jurisdiction of the sheriff and portreeves. A narrow entrance – one of six around the precinct – was known as Beargate and carried a door of blackened oak, studded with crude bolt-heads and iron bands. During daylight it lay open and led into the territory of Henry Marshall, Bishop of Exeter, whose diocese stretched from the edge of Somerset to the tip of Cornwall.
Beyond Beargate, there was a stifling clutter of buildings on twisting lanes. Here lived those of the twenty-four canons who were resident in Exeter, the other ranks of the cathedral hierarchy and the servants, families and hangers-on who made up the considerable population of the religious heart of the city. The lanes were as filthy as those in the rest of the town, composed of trodden mud and refuse. The coroner and his hobbling, skipping clerk pushed their way through the ambling pedestrians and walked past the dwellings that clustered against the cloisters to their right. This brought them to the west end of the cathedral and the more open area of the Close.
Between the north side of the cathedral and the jumble of buildings that lined the High Street beyond were several acres of grass, weeds and bare earth. Its saving grace was a number of large trees that provided welcome shade around the edges and along the many trodden paths. The coroner spared it not a single glance – he had been familiar with the Close all his life – but if he had been of a more aesthetic turn of mind, he might have thought it incongruous that such a beautifully crafted house of God should be so closely surrounded by a combination of rubbish-dump, meadow, cemetery, games arena and market place.
Shop stalls lined the outer paths and youths noisily threw and kicked crude leather balls about. Old and fresh graves lay haphazardly across the ground, with piles of red earth thrown up by the pit-makers and old bones from previous burials, which they took to the charnel house near St Mary Major Church on the further side of the Close. A trench ran across the area, carrying sewage from the canons’ houses down towards the distant river. The all-pervading smell of garbage was as constant here as throughout the rest of Exeter. None of this reached John de Wolfe’s consciousness as he marched the last few yards around the end of the cathedral and back to the North Tower, one of the two massive blocks that flanked each side of the nave and chancel.
‘This man was to be here, was he?’ snapped the coroner over his shoulder.
Panting with the effort of keeping up, Thomas nodded. ‘Cenwulf, the sergeant said – a master-mason of Lincoln.’
They came to a halt at the foot of the tower, where a dozen men were working. Some were operating a pulley hoist to the dizzy heights of the parapet, taking blocks of stone to masons working a hundred and forty feet above them. On the ground, others were manhandling new unfinished stones from an ox-cart while yet others shaped blocks in various stages of completion. A few old men stood watching, but as the building process had been going on for most of the century – since 1114, when Bishop William Warelwast began replacing the previous Saxon church – there was little that was new to watch.
John approached the nearest man. ‘Where would I find Cenwulf of Lincoln?’ he demanded.
The craftsman rocked back on to his heels, resting his iron chisel and heavy mallet on the ground. A thick leather apron, scarred by tools and chippings, covered him from neck to knees. ‘Who wants to know?’ He was a middle-aged fellow, his face almost as leathery as his apron but relieved by a pair of bright blue eyes.