The Poisoned Chalice (18 page)

The Bishop's Palace, the grandest dwelling in Exeter, was built behind the cathedral, between it and the town wall. With a garden around it, free from ordure and rubbish, it was a pleasant spot that was wasted for most of the time, for Bishop Henry, brother of William, Marshall of England, was rarely in residence. The role of prelate was a part-time job for a politician, the most extreme example Hubert Walter's holding of the See of Canterbury. Today, the Bishop was absent, with Hubert on his way back from Plymouth.

The Archdeacon was in the palace, busy organising the coming week's events with the Precentor and the Treasurer. John de Alecon received the sheriff and his bereaved companions with sympathy, then took them to a guest room to see Hugh's father.

Guy Ferrars was a Norman's Norman, really born a century and a half too late. Large, muscular and arrogant, he still had the mind-set of one of the original conquerors who had come over with William of Normandy. To him, the English were still the defeated enemy after the battle of Hastings, even though he had not been born until eighty years later. He ruled his many manors and a castle with a rod of iron, when he was not abroad fighting either the Irish or Philip of France. John de Wolfe had met him a few times and heartily disliked the man, whose only saving grace in the coroner's eyes was his unswerving loyalty to King Richard.

When he heard of Adele's death, hardly a muscle moved in his florid face, what could be seen of it beneath the large brown moustache and beard. His son, who resembled him in many ways, spat out the news more in anger than sorrow, constantly jerking his sword part-way out of its scabbard and noisily slamming it back.

Lord Ferrars turned stony-faced to Richard de Revelle. ‘How did she die, sheriff? She was a healthy young woman.'

‘We know little about the tragedy yet. It is less than an hour since the coroner brought me the news. I hurried to see de Courcy and your son, then came here. We are on our way to the place where she lies now, trusting to learn more.'

Guy Ferrars jerked his head in a single nod of understanding and shouted for his own squire to bring his outdoor clothes. ‘We will go – and God help him who has brought this about!' he snarled.

That Saturday afternoon saw frantic activity among the various participants in this latest tragedy. Reginald de Courcy's seneschal rode off at a gallop to Shillingford to take the sad news to Adele's mother and sisters. He was to bring them back to the house in Exeter, where Adele's body would be taken for the night.

When the Ferrars and de Courcys arrived with the sheriff, John de Wolfe was waiting for them in the small courtyard. With his typical directness, the coroner told them that Adele had died of a miscarriage criminally induced by some unknown person. If a thunderbolt carrying twenty angels had descended just then their shock and incredulity could not have been greater. As John later told Nesta, if the poor girl had been hacked into a hundred pieces or flayed alive, he felt that they would have accepted it with far less dismay than hearing that she had had an abortion.

‘She was with child?' bellowed her father. ‘My dear Adele?'

‘The girl was pregnant?' roared Guy Ferrars.

They both turned to Hugh, whose father gave him a swinging open-handed blow on the side of his head that almost threw him to the ground. As he staggered upright, Reginald de Courcy punched him straight in the face, so that blood spurted from his nose and he reeled backwards again. Both older men seemed more concerned that the young woman had been pregnant than that she was dead.

‘You dirty bastard!' raved de Courcy, waving his fists in the air.

Hugh's father was purple with anger. ‘You are a Norman, boy! With Norman standards of chivalry. How could you do this to me?'

Before the lad could wipe enough blood from his face to answer, de Courcy rounded ferociously on Guy Ferrars. ‘Why could you not control this rutting son of yours, damn you? Could he not wait until Easter to bed the poor girl? Are there not enough whores in the town to satisfy him?'

Lord Ferrars, in an equally towering rage, thrust his face against that of de Courcy and his right hand came up to give him a shove in the shoulder that pushed him against the wall. ‘Don't you dare speak to me like that, God blast you!'

There was an ominous rattling of swords in scabbards and both the coroner and the sheriff stepped forward hastily to grab the combatants by the shoulders and pull them apart.

‘Now, remember where you are, sirs,' shouted Richard, waving his arm at the priory walls.

‘This is not seemly, with the lady lying dead inside,' snapped John harshly, giving Ferrars another pull.

The two men subsided, but stood glaring ferociously at each other, turning only when Hugh spat out enough blood to begin protesting his innocence. ‘It was not me, I swear it.' He gagged. ‘I never laid a finger on her.'

His father grabbed him by the ear. ‘A likely story!'

Hugh desperately rubbed blood off his face with the back of his hand. ‘It's not me, Father, I tell you! I swear it was not me!'

Once again his father grabbed him, by the neck of his tunic this time, and thrust his face close to Hugh's. ‘You swear that?'

‘Of course. I hardly so much as kissed her these last six months. To tell truth, I don't think she cared much for that sort of thing.'

‘Are you sure, my son? You swear this on your sword?'

For answer, Hugh immediately drew out three feet of steel from its sheath and holding it aloft like a processional Cross, swore solemnly on his knight's honour that it was not he who had caused Adele to conceive. In the martial ethics that were the religion of the Ferrars, this was more than enough to satisfy his father, who would have slain his son with his own hands if he discovered that he lied in making this solemn oath on his sword.

Guy turned triumphantly to de Courcy. ‘Eat your words, sir! You have defamed my family, yet now it seems it was your own daughter that was the wayward one. If it was not my son, then she must have lain with some other man!'

De Courcy, another Norman with the same reverence for such a solemn oath, was deflated. John somehow felt that the dead woman had been forgotten for the moment in this battle of family honours.

Lord Ferrars had not yet finished his tirade. Relentlessly, he went on, ‘You would have let my son wed your impure daughter, if this had not happened, sir! Affianced to my son and carrying some other lover's child, eh? Is that the way for a Norman to behave?'

This was too much for de Courcy, who tore himself out of de Revelle's restraining hands and lunged forward again at Ferrars, trying to drag out his sword at the same time.

‘Don't you dare impugn my daughter's honour, Ferrars!' he yelled. ‘She was good enough for your son yesterday. Now she lies dead yet you slander her, she who cannot defend herself. If it indeed be true that this son of yours was not the father of this illegitimacy, then she must have been the victim of some ravishment, like that poor daughter of the burgess this week.'

‘And how is it that you had not heard of this imagined rape?' snapped Guy, sarcastically.

‘She may have been too ashamed or timid to tell us,' said de Courcy, now quite persuaded that his own theory must be true. Hugh Ferrars had recovered his voice, but not his temper.

‘The father is of no consequence at the moment,' he shouted. ‘She is dead and I am not to wed her. But someone took her life, by the evil of procuring her miscarriage. He deprived me of my betrothed and my honour is at stake. I will seek him out and kill him … and then find the father and kill him too!' He whipped out his sword and waved it crazily in the air.

By now a small crowd of bystanders from the nearby huts had lined up along the low wall of the courtyard and were gazing with bated breath at this unexpected drama that had come to enliven their afternoon.

Gwyn and Thomas watched from the other side of the courtyard, the Cornishman uncertain as to whether he should wade in and knock a few heads together. But his master gave no sign, and the rank of the people involved suggested that he had better keep his fists to himself.

The sheriff, wishing himself a thousand miles away, moved in to attempt peacemaking.

‘Sirs, the strain of the moment tells on us all, especially those so close to the dead lady. But we have work to do, if we are to seek the perpetrator of this crime. I need you to look at the corpse and confirm that it is indeed Mistress de Courcy.' Grudgingly, he added, ‘And I suppose the crowner needs something similar for his formalities.'

In another part of the small city, Edgar was back at work in the shop of Nicholas the apothecary. He had been up to see Christina again and was mortified to find her listless, silent and apparently uninterested in his presence. In spite of Aunt Bernice's feeble attempts to bring them together, the Portreeve's daughter had sat pallidly in her chair by the hall fire, staring at the crackling logs, unresponsive apart from a few murmured monosyllables in answer to his attempts at sympathy.

The skinny young man sat forlornly on a stool near her side, the fringe of his hair hanging lankly down his forehead as he tried helplessly to find something to say that would arouse the smallest spark of animation in her lovely face. Edgar's feelings were ambivalent. One minute he was melting with anguished pity for his intended wife, the next he felt as if he lived in another world from the stranger called Christina. Endlessly, he thrust down the devil's thought that he could now never bring himself to marry her, a woman who had been known, in the Biblical sense, by another man.

After half an hour he gave up and, with a shaming feeling of relief, made some excuse about having to get back to his apprentice-master.

Edgar escaped into the high street and wandered blindly past the Carfoix crossing and into Fore Street, where Nicholas of Bristol had his establishment. As he went, the sense of shame at his own inconstancy gradually faded, to be replaced by growing anger. This always seemed to happen when he left the Rifford house and walked out among other people. His anger was diffuse, directed against the whole masculine world. For all he knew, the next elbow he knocked in the narrow street might be that of Christina's ravisher.

He wanted to find that man and put a sword through his ribs – not only in retribution for the girl's defilement, but in revenge for the way in which his own well-ordered life had been turned upside down. His wedding was now in jeopardy, people's fingers would be pointed at him as the lover of a sullied woman – and his treasured training as an apothecary was disrupted by all these turbulent emotions.

As he hurried along, lurching into passers-by without taking the slightest notice of their protests, he felt for the hilt of his dagger, for he carried no sword. Muttering under his breath, he prayed to all the saints he could remember that they would put the rapist in front of him at that very moment, so that he could inflict unimaginable tortures and wounds upon him with the point of his knife.

As he reached the leech's shop, sanity came upon him abruptly and, with a further flush of shame, he took his hand off his dagger and composed himself. He had realised how ridiculous his behaviour was. It was almost as if the proximity to the apothecary brought him back inside the aura of medical ethics. Edgar was an earnest young man and had read of the Greek Hippocrates, Father of Physicians, who had preached that, to a healer, everything was transcended by the welfare of the patient. Confused, he shook his head, as if throwing off devils, and pushed open the door of the shop.

Inside, the familiar scene and the smell of herbs and potions immediately calmed him. A woman was at the counter with a small boy, purchasing a salve that Nicholas was pressing into a small wooden pot with a bone spatula. ‘What do you think of this Master Edgar? Look at the lad's hands.'

Nicholas was a good teacher and shared the experience of every patient with his apprentice. Edgar forgot his troubles for a moment, to immerse himself in clinical diagnosis. A quick glance at the reddened pits in the webs of skin between the child's fingers told him it was scabies.

‘Quite right, Edgar. And what will you ask this good lady?' The apprentice turned to the woman, an anxious-looking merchant's wife from Mary Arches Lane. ‘Have you other children, mistress?'

‘Three more boys and a girl.'

‘Then smear the same ointment on their hands, for if they haven't caught it yet they soon will. And keep an eye on the rest of their skin for similar itching marks, though you needn't look above their neck, they never get afflicted in the head.'

As the woman left the shop with her greasy salve, Nicholas beamed at his apprentice's medical acumen. The apothecary was a short man of about forty, rather pasty-faced, with a shock of curly hair, prematurely grey. He had a major affliction in that a palsy of the face had struck him five years ago, leaving him with the left corner of his mouth and left eyelid sagging, the cheek drooping like a wrinkled leather purse. His lips would not quite close and spittle tended to dribble out of the corner of his mouth, which he constantly wiped away with a piece of cloth. Nicholas enquired gravely about the situation in the Rifford family and showed considerable sympathy with Edgar's current mortification.

The young man from Topsham was his only apprentice and Nicholas was a kind and considerate master, which Edgar repaid by being a devoted and hard-working assistant. They spoke for some time about the awful affair, little knowing of an even more awful business that was taking place only a few hundred yards away at St Nicholas's. Edgar soon got back to work, checking bottles and jars and refilling empty ones from stock.

As he reached up to place pottery jars with Latin names on the shelves that ran all around the walls, the apothecary was chopping herbs with a large knife on a wooden board placed on the counter. They were the last of the season, to be dried for winter use. As he methodically tap-tapped across the board, he chatted to Edgar, to try to divert the younger man's mind from his problems. They discussed the batch of fungi that Nicholas had brought in from the fields around the city that morning, those that were good to eat, that had medicinal properties and those that were poisonous.