The Elixir of Death (32 page)

'How did he come to settle on that island?' queried

Gwyn, sucking ale from his moustache.

'When he arrived, he said he was a looking for a place of solitude to live out his life, praise God and atone for his sins,' said Osbert. 'The loneliest place we could think of was the island of St Michael de la Burgh. Our priest said there was no reason to object, so off he went and built that hut.'

Further questioning produced nothing useful, and when they had finished their ale and warmed up by the fire, John and Gwyn reluctantly shrugged on their riding capes and followed the local men outside, where the overcast sky was threatening snow or sleet, though at the moment it was dry, but with a biting east wind.

As they trudged up the road, John turned to the bailiff. 'I suppose your Father Walter will have housed the corpse in the barn again,' he said cynically.

To his mild surprise, Vado shook his head. 'When I told him what had happened, he said that as a solitary hermit and a man of God, he was entitled to be laid before the altar until we buried him.'

When they got to the tiny church, they found that this was indeed the case. The mortal remains of Joel, draped in a rather grubby linen sheet which was probably a spare altar-cloth, lay on a rough bier in the centre of the square room where God was worshipped in Ringmore.

'We'll have to carry him out for the inquest,' said John. 'It's not seemly to expose his wounded body to the jury in here.' It was too cold and windy to hold the formalities in the churchyard, so a couple of men carried the corpse table by its handles over to the tithe barn.

Most of the men from the village, together with a few fisherfolk from the beach, formed an audience and a jury. John and Gwyn went through the usual routine, but when the coroner came to determine 'Presentment of Englishry', Father Walter interrupted him.

'I would speak to you alone for a moment, Crowner,' he demanded in a tone that anticipated no refusal. John walked over to the doorway, where the sour-faced priest had been watching the proceedings with apparent indifference.

'From what I saw at your last inquisition here, this 'presentment' business seems aimed at distinguishing Saxons from those of mainly Norman blood?'

'It does indeed,' said de Wolfe. 'But in this case, his very name and the fact that he can read and write must indicate that he is unlikely to be a Saxon peasant.'

The florid-faced priest nodded, the bags under his slightly bloodshot eyes sagging like those of some old bloodhound. He looked around at his flock in the barn and nudged John farther towards the open air, to be out of their hearing. 'I can certainly confirm that,' he said in a low voice. 'Now that he is dead, I am not so concerned about keeping too strictly to the sanctity of the confessional. At least I can tell you his true name and something of his origins.'

The coroner waited expectantly. Any information would be welcome, rather than the void that seemed to surround these deaths.

'He would have been seventy years old at his death, calculating from what he told me some years ago. Joel's full name was Sir Joel de Valle Torta, from a noble family with estates in Normandy and Essex. He had been a Knight Templar many years earlier.'

De Wolfe uttered a low whistle of surprise. 'A Templar! Usually, once a Templar, always a Templar. How came he to be living in obscurity on a rock stuck in the sea?'

'I cannot reveal much of the detail, even after his death. But he said that his sins weighed so heavily upon him that he received a special dispensation to leave the Order to become an anchorite, cutting himself off from the world.'

'Then his sins must indeed have been unusually vile! Can you tell me what they might have been? It may have a bearing upon his murder.'

Father Waiter pondered for a moment, as if communing with some higher authority - which he may well have been doing.

'It must suffice to say that it concerned his behaviour as a soldier. He came to confession regularly and it was always the same lament - his overwhelming guilt for his own actions in warfare. He was ever penitent and sought absolution. '

The coroner instinctively felt that this was important in understanding the man's death, so he pressed the parish priest harder.

'In which campaigns would he have served? There were bloody episodes in so many, from Ireland to Jerusalem. '

Then he had a sudden thought. 'But he has been here for over twenty years, so he could not have been with us in the last attempt in the Holy Land. Acre was the place where so many men have had cause for guilty consciences over the foul deeds that took place there.'

The heavily built vicar grunted. 'All I can tell you is that the cause of his anguish was indeed in Outremer - but long ago, for he was at the Second Crusade. That's all I know - at least, that's all I can tell you.'

The way his fleshy lips clamped shut indicated that no amount of persuasion would make him say more, but John was satisfied - though still mystified.

'The Second Crusade! The link that joins all these deaths!' he murmured.

As Father Walter swung away with an air of finality, John went back to complete the short inquest. Though it displayed the usual frustrating pattern of the previous enquiries into this series of killings, he left Ringmore with much to think about and to discuss with Thomas and Gwyn.

Two days later, the trio were breaking their fast in the cheerless room above the gatehouse in Exeter's castle. The cathedral bell was tolling for Prime, just before the eighth hour of the morning, and Gwyn was finishing a pork pasty, before tackling his bread and cheese.

Thomas had not long come from his early chantry Mass and was sitting at the table, preparing a palimpsest, a second-hand sheet of parchment. After scraping off the original writing, he was sanding and chalking it, ready to write a record of the Ringmore inquest, whenever the coroner was ready to dictate. But John was in a contemplative mood as he chewed on a strip of dried salt beef, which looked like leather. At least it gave him a thirst, which he quenched at intervals from a pint pot sitting in front of him.

'Thomas, you are a man of considerable intellect. Give us the benefit of that sharp mind of yours!'

The little clerk was unsure whether his master was being complimentary or sarcastic, but decided on the former. His peaky face creased into a smile of pride.

'On what, exactly, Crowner? , he asked, putting aside his parchment and rubbing his thin fingers together to rid them of the chalk dust.

'We have three dead men and one more injured, the only connection between them that I can see being the Second Crusade. Peter le Calve's father and this Templar, Joel, were actually there - and the steward of Shillingford and the injured son were part of the le Calve household. Is that just a coincidence, Thomas?'

The clerk pursed his lips in thought, but before he could reply, Gwyn interrupted.

'This damned Second Crusade - before my time. What was it all about?'

The teacher in Thomas leapt to the challenge. 'Giving such numbers to Crusades is unrealistic, really. God's war against the enemies of Christ goes on all the time - there's always fighting somewhere against the unbelievers. But yes, the ones where kings and princes get involved - or there's a major disaster - they tend to get numbered.'

'All I've ever heard is that this second one was a disaster, right enough,' grunted the Cornishman.

'Many of those who set off from the West never reached the Holy Land, as far as I remember,' said the coroner. 'Didn't they go off marauding on the way? And many more were wiped out on the journey?'

Thomas nodded energetically, his great store of knowledge bursting to be free. 'Many of the German army never even got out of Europe - they found wars to fight and cities to loot on the way.'

'What's this got to do with our killings here?' muttered Gwyn suspiciously.

'If this old Crusader, Joel, was so conscience-ridden that he sat on Burgh Island for twenty years, he must have been involved in something really bad,' observed John. 'What happened that could have been so awful? Something like Acre in the last Crusade?'

Thomas tapped his fingers excitedly on the trestle table. 'Damascus! I'll wager it was Damascus.'

The other two waited, impressed by their clerk's grasp of history, recently enlarged by his readings in the cathedral library.

'That's what caused the Crusade to collapse, the last straw in a catalogue of mistakes. Two kings answered the call to arms by Pope Eugenius and St Bernard of Clairvaux after the Mohammedans captured the city of Edessa. One was Louis of France and the other Conrad of Germany.'

'Didn't the English turn out for that one?' asked Gwyn.

'The country was too concerned with civil war then, between Stephen and Matilda. Quite a big English contingent set off from Dartmouth, but stopped for months in Portugal to kick out the Moors. That was about the only successful campaign in the whole Crusade.'

'So what's this about Damascus?' snapped de Wolfe. 'It was the final fiasco, both political and military. The two kings decided to besiege it, but their forces were so depleted and their tactics were so bad that they had to abandon the attempt after only three days. In their humiliating retreat, they inflicted terrible revenge and bloodshed on the surrounding inhabitants. I suspect that was the most likely source of the hermit's guilt.'

'This was all of forty-seven years ago,' objected Gwyn. 'None of us was even born then.'

'But Joel was! He would have been a lusty young fighter of twenty-three, if he was seventy when he died,' Thomas pointed out. 'And old Arnulf le Calve would have been about the same age.'

'As would Gervaise, Richard de Revelle's father!' added John.

The other two looked at him, puzzled looks on their faces.

'But his son's not been murdered, more's the pity,' rumbled Gwyn.

'No, but Peter le Calve's son was shot at - and no doubt the poor steward was mistaken for the other son,' retorted John.

There was a thoughtful silence as they pondered this until, as usual, the phlegmatic Gwyn acted as the brake on their enthusiasm.

'Hold on, wait a moment!' he grumbled. 'This is almost half a century ago, for God's sake! And we're halfway across the world from where it happened.'

He tore a piece of bread from the loaf on his lap and used his dagger to cut a wedge of hard yellow cheese to accompany it, still not convinced that all this speculation would help them discover who had killed Thorgils and the others. 'I still don't see what we can do about it! Who are the swine going to attack next?'

His officer's last question caused the coroner to feel a niggle of worry gnawing away at his mind. If this theory about vengeful Saracens was right, then they had dispatched a knight who had been in the Levant at the time of that ill-fated Crusade - and had killed the son of another, going on to wound a grandson and slaying his steward, probably by mistake. If this really was a blood feud involving the families of the perpetrators of some ancient evil, then what about the de Revelles? Old Gervaise had long been in his grave, safely beyond revenge - but if the pattern of murder was to be repeated, then was his family at risk? John cared little about Richard de Revelle, but in spite of everything he was certainly concerned about Matilda, the daughter of Gervaise.

Abruptly, he shook off the spiral of worry that had descended upon him. For God's sake, he thought, he was sitting in Exeter on a cold Monday morning, in a castle with four score men-at arms near by. His wife was either safely at home or among her friends in St Olave's church or the cathedral. This idea about secretive Saracen killers slinking about, intent on murder most foul, was surely a fantasy.

'You're probably right, Gwyn,' he conceded. 'We're letting our imaginations run away with us. But I'd still like to find the evil bastards who did this. I'm sure the answer lies out west, somewhere around Ringmore.'

CHAPTER TWELVE

In which Hilda goes on a pilgrimage

The two ship-masters who had worked for Thorgils were now more devoted to Hilda of Holcombe than ever. When her husband had been alive, she had looked after their wives and families if things went wrong while they were at sea. Now that he was dead, Hilda had seen to it that the dependants of their comrades, the murdered sailors, remained housed and fed. The latest sign of her concern for them was the arrangement she was entering into with Sir John and the portreeve, which would ensure that they and their crews would remain employed in the only trade they knew. So when Hilda asked them to take her to Salcombe, they agreed without demur. After all, the ships were hers and they were her servants, but they did it willingly, rather than as a duty.

'We need to go there soon anyway,' said Roger Watts, the older captain. He was a short, rotund man with a weather-beaten face and bright red hair. 'Must keep an eye on those shipwrights who are repairing the Mary.'

He did not see it as his place to ask the mistress why she wanted to make even a short voyage so late in the season, but the other ship-master, Angerus de Wile, was not so reticent. A lanky man of about twenty-eight, with an under-shot lower jaw that gave him the appearance of a bull-baiting dog, he respectfully wondered why Hilda wished to brave the cold and the possibly bad weather.

'For several reasons, Angerus,' she replied, as she poured them each a jug of cider in the kitchen room of her fine house. 'I have a need to see where my husband died on the ship he loved. Somehow it would help me to close off that part of my life. But I also wish to make some enquiries in the district, to know if anything has been heard of the villains who killed Thorgils.'