‘How can the signs not become apparent, if the fellow has to grope around in a bucket of boiling water?’
De Boterellis looked coldly at him. ‘Are you questioning the wisdom of the Holy Father’s pronouncements on a Christian purpose that has existed since time immemorial?’
Fortunately, John had the sense not to pursue the matter – even the King’s coroner was not immune to charges of sacrilege.
‘That’s enough of this delay,’ snapped the sheriff. ‘Get on with it.’
He stood aside and the Precentor made the sign of the cross over the bucket, mirrored by Thomas who skulked in the background.
The guards shoved Fitzhai to the edge of the bucket, where he had a final spasm of cursing and shrinking back from the rim of the vat. One of the soldiers grabbed his left arm and forced it towards the water. At last, accepting the inevitable, the Crusader screamed, ‘Let me be, I’ll do it my way!’
With a wild shout of defiance and despair, he plunged his arm into the bubbling, steaming liquid. Screaming in agony through clenched teeth, he bent so that his shoulder was almost in the water, groping desperately at the bottom, circling the base to find the rock.
With a great cry of agonised triumph, he threw himself sideways to hurl the stone out of the bucket. It flew across the dungeon and bounced off a wall, to lie steaming on the muddy floor.
Fitzhai crumpled to the ground, keening in pain and attempting to shield his scalded arm with his good one. Thomas de Peyne was quietly vomiting against the wall, until John curtly told him to pull himself together and make a record of the event.
The sheriff and the Precentor murmured together in low voices while the men-at-arms, as sympathetically as they could without attracting the attention of Ralph Morin or the sheriff, lifted Fitzhai from the floor. They supported him while the gaoler shuffled across with a few handfuls of fresh hay and some rags. Well used to these mutilating ordeals, he studied the burned arm with clinical interest, inspecting the fiery red skin, the early swelling and loosening of the surface layer.
Spreading the hay over the limb, which worsened the excruciating agony of the victim, he wound the grubby rags around the arm to hold it in place.
Thomas de Boterellis stopped muttering to the sheriff and addressed Fitzhai, who was now dead white in the face and leaning heavily against one of the soldiers. ‘Your fate will be judged at noon, when the arm will be inspected. A ruddy hue is to be accepted as inevitable and will not deny your innocence. But if Almighty God causes the arm to blister, peel or suppurate, then your guilt is proven.’
‘And you will be hanged!’ added the sheriff robustly.
‘After a trial before the Justices in Eyre,’ snapped John, ‘because the death for which you accuse him of murder was recorded in my rolls before you took him into custody.’
De Revelle gave one his patronising sighs. ‘He goes back into the gaol, whatever is decided about when he is to be hanged.’
‘Prejudging it again, Richard?’ boomed the coroner. ‘The arm has not yet been examined. The miracle of innocence might take place, for all we know.’
The look that the sheriff gave the coroner in response to his jibe suggested strongly that he had as much faith in the Ordeal as John and was looking forward to the hanging.
‘We shall see, Crowner, we shall see.’
Chapter Fourteen
In which Crowner John receives news from Southampton
The long palisade of turreted wall brooded over the busy quayside. Ships of all sizes, their yards carrying furled sails tilted up against the masts, berthed end to end against the wharf. Barrels, bales and boxes were being hurried up and down a host of gangplanks that levelled off gradually as the tide went down in the Solent.
Gwyn of Polruan ambled from tavern to inn, from inn to lodging house along the half-mile of rambling dockside. Huts, shanties and storehouses were built against the landward bank, amid the more solid houses of ship-owners and wool-traders. He had arrived the night before, after coming along the coast through the smaller ports of Lyme, Bridport, Weymouth and Poole. None had turned up any sightings of Hubert de Bonneville and Southampton was now his main hope. It seemed unlikely that the returning Crusader would have crossed the Channel further east, if the group that contained Fitzhai had intended to make for the Normandy coast at Harfleur.
By mid-morning the massive Cornishman had visited a dozen drinking places on the quayside and even his iron constitution was beginning to feel the effects of a jar of ale in almost all of them. He sat for a moment’s respite on a bollard, a tree-stump set in the stone wharf, grooved by the hawsers of a thousand ships that had been tied to it. One such vessel was straining at it now, the ropes creaking as the hull moved slightly on the swell that flowed in from the sea beyond the Isle of Wight.
It was a Flemish boat and was being loaded with bale after bale of English wool, squeezed into hessian bags and tied tightly with cords. A succession of labourers trotted up the gangway in pairs, each holding one end of a large sack.
After a few moments, Gwyn’s head cleared and he suddenly discovered that he was hungry, needing something solid to soak up the lake of beer swilling around in his stomach. He left the tree-stump and went diagonally across the crowded quayside, dodged by handcarts, jogging porters, sailors and merchants. Wagons drawn by bullocks and dray-horses creaked slowly along the wharf, heaped with bales of wool, or barrels and jars of wine, kegs of dried fruit from southern France and dried meat and fish to victual the King’s army in Normandy. The air was redolent with a hundred smells, from the spices of valuable cargoes to the ubiquitous stench of dung that dotted the ground from the draught animals.
Gwyn picked his way through the odorous puddles and stepped over ropes, heading for the next tavern, a large wood-framed hut with plastered wall-panels and a roof of bark shingles. Over the single door swung a crude gilded metal crown. Inside, the smoky, noisy interior was bustling with as much activity as the docks outside. Gwyn used his bulk to shoulder a way to a vacant space on a plank bench under a window, which was merely a hole in the wall with wooden bars set vertically.
Eventually a slatternly girl with a strange accent that Gwyn thought might be from the distant North, understood his Cornish patois well enough to bring him horse-bread, cheese, mutton and more beer. As he filled himself, he looked into his purse to see how his funds were lasting. He had been two nights on the road and would need another two to get back to Exeter. The whole trip would cost at least eightpence and he wondered again where Master John found the money.
He knew the knight had a fair income from his wool partnership, but Gwyn assumed that he also kept back some of the deodand and felony confiscations for working expenses.
As he was chewing and meditating on his master’s finances, the man next to him drank up and left. Almost immediately the space was claimed by a bigger fellow, who dropped heavily on to the bench and bumped against Gwyn, jolting the arm that was just pushing a piece of cheese beneath his red moustache.
‘Sorry, mate – crowded in here, by God.’
As he had had the grace to apologise, Gwyn mumbled something neutral, then noticed that the man, who had cropped hair and a bull-like neck, had the appearance of a soldier. He wore the same type of thick leather jerkin as Gwyn and a heavy belt carrying a curved dagger of distinctly Eastern pattern. As the newcomer waved hopefully at the serving girl, he displayed a wide gold ring with a crescent-moon motif carved into it.
Using the camaraderie of the militia to start up a conversation, Gwyn struck a rich vein of information. The fellow was Gruffydd, a Welshman of Gwent, so he could converse with him well enough in his own Cornish. Gruffydd had been in Palestine for almost two years and his service as a mercenary archer overlapped the period that Gwyn had spent there with John de Wolfe. They had places, people and battles in common.