The Poisoned Chalice (20 page)

‘I am the King's coroner and this is my officer. You are the woman they call Bearded Lucy.'

It was a statement, rather than a question, but the old crone nodded. She was bent far worse than Thomas, but probably from the same phthisis of the spine, thought John.

‘I need to ask you some questions, woman.'

Lucy cackled. ‘Am I accused again of being a witch, sir? I care not. It would be a mercy to be hanged or drowned, anything rather than live like this.'

‘I am told that you have been know to help women who are with child and wish to lose their burden?'

She sighed. ‘Do you want to come in, sirs? Or will you arrest me out here?'

They declined to go into the hut, having a fair idea of the state of the inside and its various infestations.

John, used to human suffering and despair, yet felt stirrings of sympathy for the old woman, whose mind seemed clear though her body was a wreck. ‘We are not here to arrest you, old woman, but I need information about a woman who lies dead in the city.'

He explained about Adele de Courcy and the nun's diagnosis of a bleeding miscarriage. ‘Did such a lady ever seek your help?'

Bearded Lucy's dulled eyes rose to meet his and, hardened as he was, he flinched a little and remembered all the tales of witches that his mother had told him as a child. ‘Describe her to me,' she demanded.

The coroner did his best and the crone began to nod. ‘It must be the same one. Very rarely does any lady of quality come to me. I deal mostly with my neighbours and those from the lower town and the villages nearby. But such a woman visited me a month or two ago.' Another spasm of coughing racked her. Then she said, ‘My conscience is clear for I could do nothing for her. She had missed two of her monthly issues and was getting desperate. I did not ask why, though she wore no wedding ring.'

‘Did you do any damage to her, old wife?' John demanded.

‘No, those days are over for me. But I gave her some herbs, aloes and parsley, and some pessaries of pennyroyal. She gave me sixpence, bless her, then went away.'

Gwyn broke into the inquisition. ‘How do you know they did her no harm, then?'

The hag swivelled her bent head and looked up at him obligingly. ‘Because she came back. Two weeks ago she returned and said that she was still with child, as my previous potions had not had any effect. They rarely do, for when women miscarry in the early months it is because they would have done so anyway. But sometimes I get the credit for what God performs.'

‘She wanted something stronger?'

‘She wanted me to interfere with her – the lady knew, as I did, that she had gone too far for any of my witchcraft to have the slightest effect.'

John glared at the old woman. His previous pity had evaporated. ‘So what did you do to her?'

‘Nothing, sir. Look at this.' She raised her arms and held her hands in front of her. They shook like leaves in the wind. ‘And my eyesight is almost gone, I have cataracts in both. What chance is there for me to do anything? I can just manage to find my mouth on the times when I have some food.'

Gwyn murmured to the coroner, ‘If it was two weeks ago, it can hardly have been here, if the lady bled yesterday.'

John nodded and turned back to the hag. ‘You swear you did nothing?'

‘I told her there was nothing I could do and she went away, poor girl.'

John tackled her for a few more minutes, but there seemed nothing more she could or would tell him. He had the tickle of intuition that there was something else she might have said, but all his prising failed to bring it out.

When the bearded woman began a prolonged fit of coughing that ended in a trickle of blood at the corner of her loose-lipped mouth, he decided that enough was enough, and they squelched their way back to the relative civilisation within the city wall.

For once, that Saturday evening was peaceful in Martin's Lane. John decided that he had better give the Bush a miss and sit at his own fireside with his wife. The fire crackled cheerfully, thanks to a large supply of beech logs that Mary had piled up at one side of the cavernous hearth.

However, the atmosphere was still hardly jolly as John sat, fidgeting and bored beyond measure. Matilda, determined to play the devoted wife for once, worked with her needle – or, at least, at untangling skeins of silk thread that one of her cronies at St Olave's church had given her for embroidery. De Wolfe hunched in his seat, his body burning on the side facing the fire and shivering on the other, as the inevitable east wind found its way across the stone floor. As well as a chimney, Matilda had insisted on flagstones, considering the usual warmer straw- or rush-strewn floor as low-class.

Outside it was pitch dark, though the sixth bell had not yet sounded from the cathedral, a few hundred yards away. The snow still came down in irregular flurries, sufficient to whiten the roofs but not enough to settle on the muddied ground.

John had disgorged all his news and had fallen silent for lack of anything else to say. Matilda had heard his account of the unproductive visit to Bearded Lucy with a disdainful sniff, conveying her disapproval of his association with such common people.

To pass the time and relieve his boredom, he took to drinking more than usual. After a quart of ale at their evening meal, he opened a stone flask of Eric Picot's French wine, digging out the wooden stopper with the point of his dagger after peeling off the waxen seal. His wife deigned to take a small cupful, most of which stood untouched alongside her chair, but the coroner attacked the red liquor with morose gusto. Eventually, his tongue loosened a little by the drink, he had the bravado to return to a subject that Matilda had vetoed earlier.

‘Are you quite sure that you have never heard of anyone who will procure a miscarriage in this town?'

She raised her broad face to give him a glare of disapproval. ‘I told you, John, that kind of matter does not concern me. It is a crime, as well as a sin against the holy teachings,' she proclaimed virtuously.

‘But among the ladies' gossip, surely there are whispers now and then of such happenings,' he persisted.

Matilda hesitated. ‘Well, some years ago, one of the wives of a rich woollen merchant, who already had six children, fell desperately ill with a purulent fever after dropping a baby at the fourth month. There were rumours that she had deliberately sought damage to herself to get rid of the child, but nothing was definitely known.'

‘And who might have done the damage?'

She looked at her husband with pitying contempt at his naïvety. ‘How would I know that? She was hardly likely to vouchsafe the details, it was but a rumour. I do know that the leech Nicholas of Bristol treated her almost mortal fever – and did it well, by all accounts, for she survived.'

John stored away this nugget of information and fell to drinking again, as the wind whistled outside and his old hound Brutus crawled surreptitiously nearer to the fire.

Elsewhere in the city, the recent crimes against two of its womenfolk were under earnest discussion, the same person figuring largely in their arguments.

‘Why did de Revelle release them within the hour?' demanded Edgar of Topsham. ‘Someone in that shop knows about the attack on my Christina yet the sheriff has let it go by default.' He was sitting again in Eric Picot's bachelor room above the wine store in Priest Street, with his father and the Breton huddled around the hearth.

‘I discount those two smiths,' said Picot. ‘Granted, they are unintelligent scum, but all such workmen make eyes and catcalls after pretty girls without having to be ravishers. I still think that their master could tell us a thing or two about what went on that night.'

Edgar muttered incoherently at this, his thin face reddening in the firelight and his hands grasping at his knees, as if in practice for gripping the throat of Christina's assailant.

‘We have no proof whatsoever that anyone in that silversmith's place had anything to do with this,' said Joseph reasonably, but his voice had a reluctant note, as if he wished he could say otherwise. He turned to Eric, his friend and trading partner. ‘Has Mabel told you anything useful since you spoke to her?' Joseph tactfully avoided any reference as to why or when Picot might have been talking to Fitzosbern's wife.

‘She would believe anything of that swine of a husband,' said the wine merchant, with feeling. ‘But hard fact is another thing. She says he has made no mention of anything remotely concerning Christina, but he's hardly likely to, is he?'

Edgar scowled. He was almost convinced of the master silversmith's guilt. ‘Did she give any account of his movements on Wednesday evening?'

Picot gave a Gallic shrug of doubt. ‘He was out from the seventh hour, when his workmen finished their labours. But Mabel says he is out almost every night. He attends many guild meetings and also visits several taverns. She suspects he has at least one other woman somewhere in the town, but certainly he was not at home from the seventh bell until about midnight.'

Joseph stroked his long grey beard. ‘That is poor evidence for his wrongdoing, unless we can discover where he was when this awful thing took place. But I see little chance of discovering that.'

The apothecary's apprentice was getting more and more agitated as the conversation went on. ‘He is the man – I feel it in my bones! Fitzosbern is well recognised as a philanderer and lecher. The whole town knows it, but most are afraid to say so, because he is a powerful voice in the merchant guilds. Even the sheriff defers to him – look how he let off his two men with hardly a word.' Edgar jumped up and began pacing the room, which was difficult as it was only about three steps each way.

‘For God's sake, boy, sit down,' snapped his father. ‘There's nothing you can do without further proof.'

‘I'll beat it out of him, see if I won't,' said his son wildly. ‘I'll challenge him to a trial by battle.'

Eric Picot sighed. ‘You can't do that. It's almost impossible, these days. You have to go to five sittings of the county court first, unless the justices of assize declare he has killed one of your kin. And, anyway, Fitzosbern would almost certainly kill you!'

Edgar continued to throw himself about the room for a while, while the two older men talked together. The he headed for the steps to the ground floor. ‘I'm going to visit Christina, to see what she says. I can't sit around like this, doing nothing.' He clattered away, while his father and his friend looked at each other and sighed.

In Goldsmith Street just off the high street near the Guildhall, Guy Ferrars was also with his son, closeted in the room that Hugh rented from de Courcy's friend. Like the group in Priest Street, they huddled around the fire in a high, draughty room, discussing the tragic events of the day.

‘What's to be done, Father? Surely you believe me now that I had no part in getting Adele with child.'

The big warrior-like man asserted sadly. ‘I cannot doubt your word, Hugh. But two things must be worked out. Who was the father? And who killed her by clumsy interference?'

Hugh nodded grimly. ‘We must know that – and soon! I made no jest when I said that I would have both their lives.'

Lord Ferrars laid a restraining hand on his son's broad shoulder. ‘You must be careful, Hugh. We Ferrars have great power in this part of England but we mustn't assume we can ride roughshod over everyone. If we can find the miscreants, it may be better to let the law deal with them. For every high-handed act we make that needs a favour from the law officers, we increase our indebtedness to them. I wish to stay well in credit when it comes to taking favours in this county.'

Hugh scowled. ‘But the law can never touch a man for making a woman pregnant. We would all be at the gallows or in the stocks if that were so!'

‘That is true,' his father said, slowly, ‘but there are other ways of taking revenge without putting yourself in peril.'

Hugh jumped up and, like the young apothecary on the other side of the city, paced up and down. He had already had a fair amount to drink that evening, and now stopped at his table to swallow the better part of half a pint of mead. His bristly fair hair and short neck seemed to suit his pugnacious nature. ‘Father, my honour is in tatters! I was to be married at Easter to a handsome woman of an acceptable family. Now I am not only deprived of a bride but will soon be the laughing-stock of half England for being cuckolded before I even reached the altar.' He slammed his thigh with a sword-hardened hand. ‘Somehow I have to get satisfaction for this double insult. I need to kill someone!'

His father's reply was interrupted by a knocking at the street door. Hugh's squire, who lay on a pallet in the vestibule, comforted by a gallon jar of ale, got up to open it and ushered in Reginald de Courcy, swathed in a thick serge cloak peppered with snowflakes.

Their parting that afternoon at St Nicholas's had been anything but amicable and Guy Ferrars and his son looked coldly at their visitor. However, an unexpected olive branch was waved in their faces. ‘I come to apologise for my behaviour today,' said de Courcy, in a voice quivering with emotion. ‘I was overcome with shock and grief. I think we all may have uttered unfortunate words in the heat of the moment and I, for my part, regret them.'

Guy Ferrars, Norman chivalry soaked into his very bones, could do nothing but gracefully accept the apology. ‘We are joined by a common tragedy, de Courcy. Our anger should be directed at whatever villains are responsible, not at each other.'

Reginald bowed his head in agreement. ‘That is exactly what my good wife, Eva, told me. She is mortified beyond description by the loss of Adele and I doubt she will ever fully recover. Even the support of our other daughters fails to soften this mortal blow against our family.'