The apprentice was shaking in the background, his face ashen, as if he half expected to be accused of killing his master. It was common knowledge in Waterbeer Street that he hated the apothecary for the way he was treated, but de Wolfe sensed his fear and reassured the boy that he was not a suspect. He knew nothing of any visitor that evening, but the very fact that he had been sent away by his master suggested to John that someone had been expected.
‘Best have a look around,’ he growled at the constables, once they had looked at the body. There was nothing to be seen out of place in the storeroom or back yard, and when they climbed the ladder, the upper rooms, though dismal and untidy, seemed undisturbed.
‘That chest is unlocked,’ quavered the apprentice, who had followed them upstairs. He pointed to the stout box, which had the lock lying open on the top. ‘The master never leaves it like that!’
Knowing of the apothecary’s reputation for covetousness, Osric suggested that he might have been robbed, but when the coroner lifted the lid he whistled in surprise at the sight of so much money. ‘Selling pills and lotions must be a profitable business!’ he commented. ‘Whoever came to slay him certainly didn’t commit armed robbery.’
John saw the lad gaping at the mass of bags and loose silver, more money that he was ever likely to see again for the rest of his life. On impulse, de Wolfe bent and grabbed a handful of coins, which he stuffed quickly into the boy’s pouch.
‘You’re out of a job now, so this will tide you over.’ He glared at the two constables. ‘You didn’t see that, understand? Now put the lock back on the chest and keep your mouths shut, both of you.’
He marched back to the ladder and climbed down, calling up orders to Osric. ‘Send someone up to Rougemont and get the guards to take the corpse up there. I’ll hold the inquest tomorrow.’
There was no way in which he could cram it into the storeroom of the priory, both because it would be indecent to lodge it with a female body — and because the prior, a miserable man at the best of times, had already grumbled about the frequency with which his premises were being used as a dead-house.
‘We’ll have another corpse to house very soon,’ said Osric, as they set off for Fore Street. ‘It’s been a busy day!’
As Thomas was absent, the coroner was glad to see a familiar figure coming towards them as they turned into Northgate Street, garbed in a black Benedictine robe. It was Brother Rufus, the rotund priest from Rougemont who acted as the garrison chaplain at the chapel of St Mary in the inner ward. He was an amiable if garrulous fellow, who seemed to have a fascination for the investigation of crime and who had several times latched on to de Wolfe’s inquiries, to the annoyance of Thomas, who was very jealous of his own position.
‘Just the man I need,’ shouted the coroner. ‘One who can write for me on a parchment roll!’
He explained his lack of a clerk to record the events of the evening and the priest was more than happy to oblige. As they had to go past St Olave’s on the way, Rufus went in and persuaded Julian Fulk to loan him a quill, ink bottle and a sheet of parchment. The chaplain was agog to know what was happening, and John gave him a summary as they hurried on down to the next scene of death. He was glad to hear that the chaplain was strongly against this persecution of witches and had condemned Gilbert de Bosco’s obsessive campaign.
‘I used to be a village priest in Somerset, before I became chaplain at Bristol,’ he explained. ‘I soon learned there that these women — and a few men — were invaluable in such places, far from apothecaries or monkish infirmaries.’ He puffed a little as he tried to keep up with the coroner’s long strides. ‘It’s true that sometimes they got up to no good, with a little sorcery against other village folk — but it was all in the mind of the victims. If they knew that a “hex” had been put upon them, they persuaded themselves that they were bewitched — all the rest was mere mummery!’
His lecture was cut off as they reached the house, where Osric stood gesticulating outside. He had gone ahead when Brother Rufus had stopped off to get writing materials and was now pushing back a small crowd of sightseers from around the door. The house was on a narrow plot, its single room built of stone, with a high-peaked roof of wooden shingles. There was a bare yard of beaten earth at the back, reached by a narrow gap between the house and the next-door building. Here a wooden lean-to shed provided the kitchen and the usual privy and pigsty lined the back fence. The coroner pushed his way past the onlookers, some of whom were shoving at Osric and making threatening noises.
‘Good riddance to another bloody witch!’ shouted one man, who promptly got a buffet on the head from another, who yelled back, ‘What evil did Elias Trempole ever do you? He healed up the ulcers on my legs and charged me nothing!’
A scuffle broke out, with abuse and counter-charges from both men and women in the crowd, which was rapidly attracting more people from the surrounding streets. John cursed himself for not wearing his sword, though he rarely needed to carry it within the city. Instead, he grabbed Osric’s badge of office, a wooden staff with a metal band at the top, and began laying into those in the crowd who seemed to be the worst troublemakers. With a series of smacks and prods, he roared at them to be silent, and such was the power of his dominating appearance that they all subsided into a glowering, muttering but more docile mood.
At this point, the other constable, who John now remembered was called Theobald, came running up and Osric commanded him to keep everyone out of the plot, while he accompanied the coroner and Brother Rufus around the side of the house to the yard.
Here they repeated the routine they had followed in Waterbeer Street, as the body of the more elderly Elias Trempole had an identical wound in the same place on his head and no other injuries. The castle chaplain poked about in the other sheds in the yard, then sat on the seat of the earth closet in the privy with his piece of parchment spread on the blade of a wooden shovel placed across his lap. As John prepared to dictate what Rufus should write as the coroner’s record, he admired the monk’s adaptability, though he recalled that Rufus had acted as a priest in several French campaigns and had learned to be as flexible as the soldiers to whom he administered.
‘You had best first set down the facts about Walter Winstone,’ he suggested to his new scribe and proceeded to give a quick summary of the apothecary’s death. Then he described the sparse findings concerning the alleged wizard of Fore Street, as he stood stooped over the man’s corpse.
‘Had you better have a look inside, Crowner?’ suggested the chaplain, cocking his head towards the back of the house, from which came wailing and weeping. He gathered up his writing materials and followed de Wolfe through the door in the lean-to addition at the back of the building. Inside, it was more of an alchemist’s den than a kitchen, with a clutter of flasks, pots and pestles and mortars on several benches and a haphazard collection of plant and animal remains hanging from the shelves and rafters. Bundles of herbs and strange dried plants competed for space with mummified reptiles and strips of fur and leather.
‘Best keep those troublesome folk outside from seeing this collection,’ grunted de Wolfe. ‘It’ll only make them more convinced than ever that someone else was in the habit of raising Satan in his kitchen.’
‘Especially if they see these,’ added Rufus, drawing John’s attention to something on one of the littered tables. He pointed to two small straw figures, which John recognised as being almost identical to the one found under the saddle of Robert de Pridias. They had no cloth or hair attached, but near by were a couple of crude metal spikes similar to the one he had seen in Alphington. Like many in the city, the chaplain knew all the details of de Pridias’s death, as his widow had proclaimed them loudly around the town.