His stomach satisfied and his mind glad of some peace without his wife glowering at him across the hearth, he sat and finished another pint of ale, while Brutus crunched contentedly on a piece of bone that John had fished out of his stew. He stared unseeingly at a faded tapestry hanging on the opposite wall, which vaguely depicted some biblical scene, as his mind reviewed the events of the last day or two.
The Bush was destroyed, but already its rebuilding was in hand. Nesta was safe and could remain out of sight until this present madness had been resolved. It looked as if Gilbert de Bosco’s obsessive campaign was grinding to a halt, if the archdeacon’s view that the bishop no longer had any stomach for it was correct. The burgesses weighing in with their concerns about the effect the unrest was having on commerce was also significant, as they were a powerful lobby, which even the Church could not totally ignore.
The death of Henry de Hocforde was something of a side issue now, but at least it cleared up a few murders and unfinished inquests. John doubted that they would ever see Hugh Furrel again, but if he showed his face in Devon he could now be hanged fairly rapidly.
The unknown quantity was still outstanding — the matter of Richard de Revelle. Although his cumulative misdeeds were enough to have him dancing at the end of a rope, he was a slippery customer and his fate depended partly on how heavily his powerful friends would weigh against the attitude of the King’s men in Winchester. If Hubert Walter was away and some lesser chancery clerk or a minor baron dealt with the message that John had sent, then perhaps very little would happen. De Wolfe scowled to himself at the awful thought that no significant censure would come back from Winchester and that the sheriff would remain in office to crow over John and make his life unbearable. If that happened, John vowed that he would either ride off with Gwyn to find a war somewhere — or elope with Nesta and go and live in Wales.
He prayed that the Chief Justiciar would send someone with sufficient clout to attend to the situation in Exeter — at least one of the Justices of Eyre or a member of the Curia Regis.
If Richard de Revelle was ejected from office, there would be the problem of a successor, perhaps a temporary caretaker until King Richard could be consulted as to his permanent representative in the county. The last time that Richard de Revelle had been ousted from the shrievalty, back at the time of the Prince’s rebellion in ’93, his place as sheriff had been taken by Henry de Furnellis, an elderly knight from Exeter. His father, Alan de Furnellis, had been sheriff twenty years earlier, but had died in office within a year. Henry was a dull, pompous man who did as little as possible to exert himself, but as far as John knew he was honest, which would be a welcome change in a county sheriff. If de Revelle was ousted, then he grudgingly accepted that de Furnellis would be acceptable as a stopgap, at least until a better long-term candidate could be found.
His musings were interrupted by voices in the vestibule outside and he half expected it to be the usual visit by Gwyn informing him that some new corpse had been found or a woman had been ravished. But Mary put her head around the screens to announce that Adam the carpenter had called to see him. John went out to the vestibule to meet the stocky, almost bald craftsman, who stood holding a hessian sack in his hands.
‘I got my journeyman and two apprentices to start clearing the wreckage as soon as you left, Crowner,’ he explained. ‘And almost straight away, when they dragged off the main ridge beam, I saw this lying among the ashes.’
With Mary and Lucille peeping in horrified fascination around the corner of the passageway, Adam Kempe upended the sack and tipped the contents out on to the beaten earth floor of the vestibule. Amid a shower of charred wood fragments and burnt straw, a blackened skull and several fragmented bones spilled across the ground. The skull had burned through over much of the cranium and what was left was fragile and brittle, as were several segments of leg bone and some vertebrae.
‘There were more bits there, but we thought this was enough to show you. The lads are collecting the rest of the poor old hag as they move away the rest of the debris,’ said the carpenter, with morbid satisfaction.
John bent and picked up the skull, turning it over in his hands. The best-preserved parts were the few teeth that were left in the old woman’s jaws, though even they were blackened and cracked.
‘Well, at least the inquest jury will have something to view!’ grunted the coroner. ‘It’s too late to arrange today and tomorrow’s Sunday, so it will have to be on Monday. Whoever found this will have to attend the inquest. I’ll hold it in the Shire Hall at Rougemont.’
He scooped up the bone remnants and dropped them back into the sack. Adam departed, leaving Mary to cluck her tongue at having to clean up a pile of ash and some small fragments of Bearded Lucy from her clean vestibule floor.
The next day Matilda was still subdued and hardly spoke a word to her husband, except to ask him civilly whether he would accompany her to church that morning. Feeling sorry for her low spirits and unaccountably slightly guilty — although he knew no real reason why he should be — he agreed and, both dressed in black, they walked to St Olave’s, where he endured a long-winded Mass and an oration from Julian Fulk. He was thankful that at least the unctuous priest had dropped the witchcraft theme and suspected that John de Alençon had been firmly countermanding the edicts of Gilbert de Bosco on that score.
However, that particular canon seemed undeterred and had thrust himself upon the priest at the church of St Petroc in the high street, almost belligerently announcing to the man that he would give the sermon today, as if this were some great favour.
Having heard that the archdeacon had been undermining his crusade and in spite of learning of the bishop’s new coolness regarding the issue, Gilbert stubbornly persisted in his mission. However, still fermenting in the back of his mind was the image of the burning Lucy and her last words cursing him. Like John, he had a fleeting vision of something strange and unearthly at the moment the roof crashed upon the old woman, and he had been uneasy ever since. Each evening, he could not prevent himself from looking up at the sky and checking on the size of the moon, which was now at least three-quarters full.
The previous day, he had felt a burning sensation around the back of his neck and by evening he had a hot red swelling chafing against the collar of his cassock. His steward had put hot clay poultices upon it, but by this morning he had four egg-sized lumps pouting under the skin and a visit to the cathedral infirmarian had confirmed his diagnosis of a series of boils, amounting to a carbuncle.
‘They’ll have to get more proud than this, before they burst!’ cackled the infirmarian, an old Benedictine who had been retired from Buckfast Abbey to look after the health of the Exeter ecclesiastics.
Gilbert now had a long length of coarse flannel cloth wrapped around his neck, covering a foul sticky paste applied by the old monk. What with the heat of the day and the internal heat of the inflamed tissues, he was most uncomfortable and could hardly turn his head. He refused to believe that this was anything to do with the curse, but part of his mind could not help recalling the seven curses placed on Egypt in the Book of Exodus, one of which was a plague of boils.
Worse was to come, and a genuine fear descended upon de Bosco, which only his deep faith managed to keep at bay. At St Petroc’s, when the time came for him to stand on the chancel steps and deliver his sermon on the iniquities of cunning women and their heresy and sacrilege, he suddenly felt a most peculiar feeling spreading down the left side of his body. He opened his mouth to speak, but it drooped down to one side, spittle running out of the corner. At the same time, he felt his left arm go numb and found he was unable to move it.