The Poisoned Chalice (30 page)

The Cornishman, his unruly hair looking like a hayrick in a gale, turned to the coroner. ‘That's odd. Gabriel and a couple of his men have just brought in those two men from Fitzosbern's workshop – and I'm sure that young Edgar and his apothecary master were with them.'

De Wolfe looked up quickly. ‘Brought in? You mean they were under guard?'

‘Looked like it, especially from the noise they were making.'

John got to his feet and picked up his mantle from where it lay across the table. ‘What's that bloody man up to now? Maybe that's what he meant this morning when he said something about following other avenues.' He slung the cloak over his shoulders and made for the stairs. ‘You'd better come with me, Gwyn – and you can check through the rest of those tasks for tomorrow, Thomas. I must go to see what new mischief the sheriff is planning.'

They tracked the prisoners to the undercroft of the keep and found them herded together in the cold and dismal area outside the gateway to the gaol. The place always reminded John of a cave in which he had once hidden during a French campaign, with a musty smell of old dampness, and water slithering down green walls. At the back of the low hall, under one of the arches of the vaulting, the obese gaoler, Stigand, was stoking a small fire with logs.

The sergeant-at-arms was in charge of the party, looking slightly awkward as he knew of the difference in views between sheriff and coroner over this affair. ‘Sir Richard himself sent the orders to bring them in, Crowner not more than an hour ago,' he said apologetically.

Of the four detainees, the only one to be voluble was Edgar of Topsham, whose voice Gwyn now recognised as that of the protester he had heard from the window. Struggling vainly in the grip of a soldier, his dishevelled fair hair fell even more into his eyes than usual. ‘He promised my father that this was all over!' he shouted at John. ‘This is the second time that the sheriff has dragged me here. What does he hope to gain from it?'

There was a new voice from behind them, as Richard de Revelle had come in unnoticed, together with Ralph Morin, the castle constable. ‘I hope to gain the truth at last for my patience has run out with these milk-and-water methods.' He turned to the coroner. ‘The failure of Mistress Rifford to give any credence to these unjust accusations against Godfrey Fitzosbern, and that news you gave me about this apothecary here, make me determined to resort to more effective methods.'

The words sounded ominous in the dank, echoing vault.

‘I fail to see what you hope to achieve, when there is no useful evidence from anywhere,' retorted John, who had a good idea what the sheriff was planning.

‘I hope to gain confessions Crowner! Your methods of seeking a solution to these crimes that have plagued Exeter this past week and more have led nowhere. So now let me try my way, if you please.'

He turned imperiously towards the two workers from the silversmith's shop, who stood cringing behind the apothecary and his apprentice. Their forebodings of this morning, when the law officers came into their workshop, seemed to have come true with awful rapidity. ‘Alfred and Garth, I seem to remember you are called that,' he began menacingly, ‘I suspect you, either one or both, of being the ravisher of Christina Rifford. Will you now confess to that crime, eh?'

Both broke out into a cacophony of denial, Alfred falling to his knees on the cold slime of the floor, pleading with his hands outstretched. The sheriff impatiently gestured to the guards and they silenced the two men, dragging the older one to his feet and giving the boorish Garth a clout over the head to close his mouth.

‘Right, we'll see if we can loosen your tongues in a little while. First, I want to deal with you, Edgar of Topsham.'

At a sign from Morin, Gabriel pushed forward the young apprentice to stand right before de Revelle. He began his usual loud protests, but the sheriff slapped him across the face with a gloved hand. ‘Be silent when I speak to you, boy. Your father is not here now to threaten me.'

John, silently observing his brother-in-law's tactics, felt that he was building up trouble for himself, unless he knew something of which John was unaware – which he doubted.

‘I am sure that our master silversmith was poisoned, whatever the leech here says, and I'll question that opinion very soon. It's thanks to our good brothers at St John's that he failed to die – but attempted murder carries the same penalty as one that is successful.' He leaned forward to put his face close to Edgar's – the young man was as tall as the sheriff and their noses almost touched. ‘I think that you gave that poison to Fitzosbern – you, the one who repeatedly threatened him, publicly said you wished him dead and who attacked him on his own doorstep.' His voice rose to a crescendo, reverberating from the uncaring stone walls. ‘Who else is a better candidate for murder, eh?'

Edgar flew off into his usual denials, this time tinged with terror as he saw the way things were going. But the soldier behind him gave him a kick in the back of the knees that sent him sprawling before the sheriff.

Richard stepped back a pace and looked down at the young man. ‘If you refuse to confess, then the law approves a process called
peine forte et dure
to encourage the memory – and no one need be a scholar to know what those words mean.'

Edgar, on his hands and knees in the mire, looked up in unbelieving horror. ‘You cannot torture me – my father will petition the King, he told you so himself.'

‘The King is over the seas. It would take your father months to get there and find him – if he ever returned, as his ships seem prone to sink. And we are here today. I do not have months to spare.'

John felt it was time to intervene. ‘Attempted murder is a Plea of the Crown, like rape. You cannot take it upon yourself to deal with the matter in this summary fashion.'

Richard sneered at this. ‘Wrong, Sir Crowner! Fitzosbern has appealed Edgar for attempting to kill him and it will be heard in the shire court tomorrow. No jury of presentment has sent the matter for trial by the King's Justices, so the Crown has no say in the issue. And today I am not trying the case by the Ordeal, I am merely seeking evidence in the form of a confession by the accepted means of
peine forte et dure
. So you have nothing to do with it, John, until you attend his trial by battle or declare him an outlaw if he should escape.' He stood back triumphantly.

John chewed over the words in his mind but could find no valid objection in law, much as the Crown authorities disliked the King's courts being bypassed by these residual old laws.

De Revelle waved a hand in the direction of Stigand and his fire. ‘Take him over there. That offensive old swine should soon have his branding irons hot enough for his purpose.'

Now screaming, rather than objecting, Edgar was dragged by two soldiers across to the archway, where the flabby gaoler was wheezing with the effort of thrusting some heavy iron rods into the red heart of the fire.

The sheriff sauntered over, leaving the two silver-workers trembling with awful anticipation of their own fate as they stood between their own guards. Nicholas of Bristol, who had not uttered a word since being brought in, stood pale-faced but impassive as he watched what was going on around him, his mouth hanging grotesquely as spittle leaked out unheeded.

At the fire, Ralph Morin was speaking in a low voice to Gabriel, his sergeant, then went to talk quietly to the sheriff, who shook his head impatiently. Like John de Wolfe, Morin thought this afternoon's adventure ill-advised – not because they had any particular aversion to torture, which had been an accepted method of law enforcement for centuries, but because he thought that it was a mistake to use it against the son of such an influential person as Joseph of Topsham.

Gabriel, acting on his commander's instructions, stepped up to Edgar and, with a single movement, ripped his tunic from neck to waist and pulled the torn cloth from his shoulders.

Now shrieking and twisting in the grip of two soldiers, who impassively held him by each arm, Edgar was pushed nearer the fire, as Stigand pulled out an iron and examined the red-hot cross-piece at the tip with professional interest. He spat upon it and heard the sharp sizzle with apparent approval.

‘I ask you again, and for the last time, Edgar of Topsham,' intoned the sheriff, ‘do you confess to poisoning Godfrey Fitzosbern?'

‘Jesus Christ help me! How can I confess to something that never happened?' screamed the young man, as the repulsive-looking gaoler, satisfied with the heat of his iron, advanced on with the glowing cross aimed at his left breast.

‘We have plenty of irons – and a good fire,' observed Richard, casually.

The branding iron was close enough for the few hairs on the young man's chest to begin shrivelling, when a shout came from behind. ‘Stop that! It was not him. He knows nothing of it.'

Stigand hesitated and the sheriff motioned him to go back. Everyone turned and looked back towards the entrance, where Nicholas of Bristol stood between his two captors.

‘Let Edgar go free. I will confess to the poison – and much more besides.'

In the approaching dusk, John walked with Nesta along the top of the city wall, between the towers of the South Gate and the Water Gate. She had wanted some air after a heavy day in the tavern and they strolled along the rampart behind the battlements like a pair of young lovers, she holding his arm. The weather had improved and, though cold, there were breaks in the cloud towards the west, where the setting sun threw a pallid pinkness over the countryside. Nesta had a green scarf wrapped over her head and a thick dun woollen cape down to her feet. ‘They'll hang him, of course?' she asked, as they stopped to look at the sunset.

‘Most likely – or perhaps instead they will use combat or the ordeal. Someone will have his life, one way or the other,' agreed John, slipping his arm around her. ‘But it's a strange situation, and depends on what happens with Fitzosbern.'

They stood silently for a moment, looking down on the vegetable gardens inside the wall, which belonged to the houses in Rock Lane. To their right loomed the huge mass of the cathedral, and elsewhere within the walls, tightly packed houses of all shapes and sizes threw up smoke into the evening sky, punctuated by the towers of the fourteen churches.

‘I don't understand all this, John,' she said, at length.

He began to explain the complexities of the day. ‘Allegedly the silversmith was going to appeal Edgar for attempted murder, according to de Revelle, though I don't know whether to believe him. Then, when Edgar was about to have a false confession burned out of him, Nicholas couldn't bear it and confessed himself.'

Nesta squeezed his arm. ‘He must have been very fond of the lad, to give his life for him.'

‘I think many apprentices brew up a father-feeling in their masters. Anyway, the bloody sheriff couldn't lose – he says he knew that Nicholas would confess before Edgar was tortured, but again I don't believe him. I think he was just lucky, for if he had branded Edgar, Joseph would have gone berserk and caused much trouble for de Revelle.' He paused and hugged her tightly. ‘If the apothecary had stayed silent, Edgar would have made a false confession and been convicted. Now the sheriff has Nicholas instead, but I don't think he cares who it is, as long as he has someone.'

They turned and looked over the new battlements, away from the city to the south and east. Almost thirty feet up, they could see for several miles across country, their eyes following the diverging roads to Topsham and Honiton. Just below them were hedged fields going down into the little valley of the Shitbrook, named since Saxon times for the town's effluent that escaped under the wall into the stream.

‘What exactly did Nicholas confess to, John?' asked Nesta.

‘He said that he had put extract of wolfsbane, sometimes called monkshood, in the wine he gave Fitzosbern. It should have killed him, but presumably he didn't swallow enough.'

John's mistress shivered a little, he wasn't sure if from the cold or the thought of being poisoned.

‘So his so-called test for poison was false?'

John gave a lop-sided grin. ‘The jest was on me, my love. Only a fool like me would take a suspected poison to the poisoner for analysis!'

‘He never gave the cat or rat any of it, then,' she said.

‘No, and his dramatic gesture of drinking the suspect wine was play-acting. He'd naturally emptied the poisoned chalice and refilled it with good liquor.'

‘But he couldn't have known that the silversmith was going to come to his shop that day,' she objected.

‘It must have been an opportunity taken on the spur of the moment. He hated the man and here was a chance to dispatch him. It could have been attributed to the effects of his neck wound, in which case the blame would have fallen on Hugh Ferrars. I'm sure the last thing Nicholas contemplated was that his apprentice would be accused.'

They walked on further towards the mass of the South Gate, above fields of Southernhay.

‘And you said that he did it because Fitzosbern was virtually blackmailing him?'

A gust of wind moaned from the east and John pulled his black leather hood more tightly on to his head. The long point at the back balanced his great hooked nose and made him look more than ever like some great bird of prey.

‘It was like this. Nicholas claims that Fitzosbern was the father of Adele's child. She had been seduced by him when she visited to order her wedding jewels. Nicholas says that he boasted that Adele wasn't at all keen on Hugh Ferrars, it was to be a marriage of convenience forced on her by her father.'

‘A seduction by Fitzosbern of one of his lady customers – that surely must have a counterpart with poor Christina?' said Nesta worriedly.

The coroner shrugged. ‘That's another matter. God knows, there'll be trouble in plenty when the first part becomes known to the Ferrars family and de Courcy – whether it's true or not!'